You know what I notice? At the elementary level, schools have become very diverse and not fragmented at all, but as people grow older, it tends to start to separate. In other words, when I was in elementary school, I don't think I even realized what race was, and it didn't seem to matter with any of my friends. People made friends with whoever wanted to be friends with them. But as you get older, the groups tend to separate. In high school, you start to see racial grouping. When you get to University, where you aren't in small classrooms anymore, you get these large "Chinese Student club" and etc. IMO these kind of things are a huge mistake.
And I think that it's also due to "multiculturalism". Every group still keeps their own community alive and distinct from everyone else, so of course an Arab youth is going to be more inclined to be friends with another Arab youth. And that's not diversity, that's just more segregation and fragmentation. That's not to overinflate the problem. I've had many fulfilling friendships over the years and none has been with my own ethnic group. But the fact is, seeing people in groups with their own ethnicity is still more common than seeing inter-ethnic groups on the street. And that is a failure of "diversity".
I'm all for inter-cultural discourse. In fact, I would love to have discussions about Western history, Chinese aesthetics, Indian philosophy, and etc, but I don't see much opportunity for any of this, because these communities seem more interested in closing themselves off and having a separate identity.
Your comments here are worth repeating.
When we talk about multi-culturalism, which in and of itself is actually distinct from immigration policy, we should be explicit about what it means. Multi-culturalism is a bargain to allow one to keep his culture while immersed in Canadian society. The problem is that leads to the promotion of the balkanization of our canadian communities into their ethnic sub-components, which the naive beleive will end up with the whole greater than the some of its parts.
The problem with associating immigration with multi-culturalism is this...the people selected to live in this multi-cultural polyglot hodgepodge, mostly arrive here from places with mostly ethnically homogenous societies where interaction with other races was limited, and racism and stereotypes are cultural norms. That's not to say it doesn't work in their part of the world. But what happens when you have arabs in Canada moving into a jewish area, or Japanese into a Chinese area. These are people that have sadly failed to reconcile for half a millenia, yet somehow multi-culturalism assumes that all will be fine.
It won't. We will start to see problems emerge as the population increases in Canada and our urban areas get denser and heretofore separated ethnic groups begin competing for resources and political attention.
The only way to prevent that is to say that certain things are wrong. It is wrong for Arabs to hate Jews for the sheer fact that they are jewish. It is definitely wrong to beat or murder your daughter because she doesn't dress like the girls back home in Pakistan. etc.
The problem is that we attack these issues from the legal perspective. We say, oh they should conform to our laws and everything will be fine. This is lowest common denominator of social order and interaction. It does not aim to foster community and social interaction, it aims to foster tolerance....as in we can stand each other, but we shouldn't really be friends. What we should be doing is attacking these base cultural attitudes, that don't fit our western social norms. As in you can dress how you want, we don't expect you to lift up your veil. But likewise, here in Canada, your daughter can dress how she wants even if her wardrobe includes applebottom jeans or punk rags.
Now let's talk about immigration. Immigration policies are supposed to select the best candidates for migration who have the most potential for success in Canada. Our system doesn't do too bad at certain aspects of this policy. For example, we do a great job at picking migrants who have useful skills and education that will allow them to be economically successful. Where we are behind is finding measures that will ensure they will be socially successful...as in fit in, feel comfortable, be accepted and be happy in Canada. Now these are of course, more challenging to define. But there are certain things we should probably consider....do we want a rabid conservative muslim who probably doesn't like western society and its freedoms (particularly our sexual freedoms) from moving here just because he has a PhD or MD? How would that person react to seeing a gay couple on the subway? Or how about an evangelical christian that feels its his mission to save the hindu souls that live in scarborough? Telling them that they are going to go to hell is not going to endear him to his community (true story). Or NE Asian migrants who each believe they are from the superior race....
Developing social selection criteria is one thing. The other is to inform potential migrants of our norms and cultural values before they migrate. Might be a good idea to tell that conservative muslim kashmiri that in canada, we let our daughters wear tight clothes and our sons can have full rights if they turn out to be gay. By informing them, perhaps they can choose if they are right for us. As it stands, the process does nothing for dis-selecting social misfits. It's is purely a process to identify successful economic migrants. And at the end of the day if money is the only value that binds, how much will we mean to each other when all is said and done?
