gizmo_2655
Gold Member
Offline
Australian Politics
Posts: 16010
South West NSW
Gender:
|
... wrote on Nov 30 th, 2011 at 11:44am: gizmo_2655 wrote on Nov 30 th, 2011 at 11:38am: ... wrote on Nov 30 th, 2011 at 11:29am: gizmo_2655 wrote on Nov 30 th, 2011 at 11:17am: ... wrote on Nov 29 th, 2011 at 6:18pm: Bob Miller wrote on Nov 27 th, 2011 at 9:31pm: Weighing its Pros and Cons, I am also for multi-culturalism. You must really like foreign cuisine. Well, I like foreign cuisine......and I quite like a lot of foreign born people and their Australian born children too.... I've found that a large number of immigrants are friendly, and go out of their way to learn about our customs and culture.... Of course you like foreign cuisine - how could anyone with a straight face say they don't like 'foreign' food? But of course you will be aware that a policy of multiculturalism is not a pre-requisite for foreigners or foreign expertise to enter these shores. The problem is that the issue is (intentionally) framed wrong. It's not like the only alternative to multiculturalism is having a 100% monocultural/monoracial society. Migrants of all colours are free to come, but they are encouraged to assimilate ie "go out of their way to learn about our customs and culture" - exactly like the greeks, italians, vietnamese that multicult-boosters use to bolster their case were. So what would you rather - a collection of tribes, or a coherent, unified culture, whoever it may comprise of? THAT is the real underlying question. But that's what multiculturalism IS...encouraging intergration... No dear friend, ASSIMILATION is what you refer to. Multiculturalism is encouraging 'new australians' to retain a separate culture. From multicultuiralism wiki: Quote:Multiculturalism is the appreciation, acceptance or promotion of multiple cultures, applied to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the organizational level, e.g. schools, businesses, neighborhoods, cities, or nations.
In a political context the term is used for a range of meanings, ranging from the advocacy of equal respect to the various cultures in a society, to a policy of promoting the maintenance of cultural diversity, to policies in which people of various ethnic and religious groups are addressed by the authorities as defined by the group they belong to.[1][2] A common aspect of many such policies is that they avoid presenting any specific ethnic, religious, or cultural community values as central.[citation needed]
Multiculturalism is often contrasted with the concepts assimilationism and has been described as a "salad bowl" or "cultural mosaic" rather than a "melting pot."[3] and from assimilation wiki: Quote:Cultural assimilation is a socio-political response to demographic multi-ethnicity that supports or promotes the assimilation of ethnic minorities into the dominant culture. The term assimilation is often used with regard to immigrants and various ethnic groups who have settled in a new land. New customs and attitudes are acquired through contact and communication. The transfer of customs is not simply a one-way process. Each group of immigrants contributes some of its own cultural traits to its new society. Sorry, I don't see it quite that way.... Pre-Multiculturalism, we had the enclave problem, but government 'mandated' (if you like)...the immigrant housing settlements like the 'silver city' hostels (all surplus quonset huts) of the post WW2 era.... The people had to live in government run hostels until they'd paid back the fare to get here........And a lack of language skills and cultural differences ,combined with predjudice effectively forced the people to clump together... Multiculturalism was designed to combat that.........The idea was to encourage immigrants to assimilate slowly while keeping their comfort zones, and to encourage understanding by local populations of the changes involved... It did work......whether or not it's still working is another thing altogether...
|