The .isms

I have to participate this Thursday in a discussion which will be partly about the theme of multiculturalism in Canada. I'd therefore like to use this opportunity to test an idea.

Consider this question: Does a country’s choice of an integration policy really have a serious long term social impact? Does adopting multiculturalism rather than pluriculturalism, republicanism or the American melting pot system mean anything truly significant in the long term?

I have a feeling that it means much less that we often assume. Why? Because only the first generation of immigrants are significantly affected by their new country’s integration policy. The second generation, with a few much publicized exceptions, is born in the new country and inevitably takes that country’s culture. It doesn't matter to them whether it is multicultural, pluricultural, unicultural or anything else. That new country is their homeland its culture is theirs.

Canadians are very good at finding anecdotes to support the claim that multiculturalism is divisive. There point to the isolated Sikhs of Brampton, the Canadian-born Islamic terrorists whose disinterest in (or hate of) Canada can be apparently attributed to the government funding of their cultural events.

This logic might make sense if other countries in the world with opposite integration policies didn’t have exactly the same issues.

Take the U.S.: They are supposed to adhere to the “melting-pot” vision, yet they have many home-grown terrorists (many of which are white skinned) and were also the first to rename the Christmas tree to Holiday Tree. This is not something you’d expect from the country of the melting pot.

France is even more serious. It is supposed to be a republican country of one nation, one people, yet there are about 8 million resentful ethnic North-Africans detached from mainstream society living in the suburbs of Paris and Marseilles. It’s hardly one nation, one people.

It seems to me that the impact of integration policies is greatly overblown. They don’t seem to alter the nature of societies in practice the way they do on paper. In my mind, they’re much more about making new immigrants feel welcome and accepted than about changing the construction of society. In that regards, I would say that multiculturalism is a success because it makes it easier for first generation immigrants to keep alive traditions that are so important to their sense of identity and belonging.