Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
You're very right. The most desirable scenario is for no one across a given metro to feel they can't go live in specific areas of the metro because they'd be made to feel uncomfortable by the racial, ethnic or linguistic makeup of certain sub-areas of it. This does not mean that certain groups might not congregate in certain areas (it makes it easier to provide certain ethnic-specific services it is true), but when you have a trend where the ethnic composition is moving in on 80, 90% or more of a single group, that's not a good sign.
In most cities there aren't any non-Greeks, non-Italians who would refrain from moving to Little Italy or Greektown simply because they are identified with those groups. I think that's where we want to be.
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Exactly.
The funny thing about Vancouver is that as a whole, looking at metro Vancouver, it is a very diverse place. But that really doesn't tell you the whole story. Surrey is very east indian, Richmond is very Chinese, etc. Rather than specific cities with a single large immigrant ethnic group, I'd much rather see everyone spread around and intermingling.
There are only two cities (city proper, excluding the suburbs) in North America I've been to that really struck me as fully achieving this.
New York City, and Toronto.
Similar numbers of immigrants can be perceived very differently. Say the country let in 1 million immigrants per year. If all million of those came from a single country, it would come across as a bit more threatening to culture than if no more than 10,000 of those million immigrants came from any single country.
With no single dominant group, there is no pressure on the current language, and everyone tends to learn it as a second language at the very least, because it is the only broadly common language between the various groups.
However if most come from a single country, as in Richmond, the dominant group tends to be less likely to learn the local language and interact with other groups, as it is entirely possible to live one's entire life within that group.
That's why I loved the two cities mentioned above. There doesn't seem to be a single dominant group. Again, my opinion, but I think the ultimate type of multiculturalism to strive for is no single majority group, but rather many many significant smaller groups of cultures and ethnicities, who intermingle, and over the long term blend together to form new hybrid cultures.
Which may sound familiar as it is the proverbial "melting pot" approach. If you ask me, our current multicultural approach tends to create many segregated ethnic communities with a lack of interaction, and this creates the resentment that is the reasoning behind the proposal in Richmond currently in discussion.
Also, to those that say there is no threat at all to English in Anglo-Canada...
Threats don't just suddenly appear overnight (it's like that metaphor with the frog in the pot of slowly heating water). They take time to become apparent, but even now one could say that there is a mild threat in certain communities like Richmond.
Whether it subsides or grows is yet to be seen, but the key is at least to recognize that it could be a possibility down the road. Should it become an issue down the road, my personal take is that we shouldn't just dismiss it as inevitable, and instead take action to prevent it.
In Quebec the erosion of French was an issue long before it came to be at the front of political headlines. But it wasn't until English was rapidly entering Quebec society mid century that it became too obvious not to do something about it.
Even the US, which has a significantly larger population, with English well established as the De Facto language has seen a significant erosion of English in areas near the south and west along the Mexican border. The enormous migration of hispanics didn't happen overnight, and it didn't become a threat to English in those regions overnight either. People seemed to have dismiss it (at least until recently), and as a result, Spanish is quickly becoming the second default language in the country. Had Americans decided it was a threat even as late as the 80's or 90's, I suspect they would have been able to prevent most of the intrusion of Spanish.
My point here is that problems like that tend to not become overwhelmingly obvious until they are well established and possibly irreversible. Thus it's important to at the very least identify things like this in their infancy. We don't necessarily need to act, but pulling the wool over our eyes is even worse. Acknowledgement at least gives the option of whether we want to intervene or not. Later on there is no option.
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