Society/Culture Why is Multiculturalism a good thing?

Tasmaniac

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Which cultures don't?

I'm not an expert on every single one of the 10's of thousands of cultures around the world.

Plenty of cultures believe in the one 'big man' running the show.

Plenty of gang subcultures don't believe in following the rule of law.

North Korea? Although a lot of that is imposed top down.

Mormons? if they had their way, all the power would be in the hands of the senior men.

Any one of dozens of crazy little christian fundie sects. I'm sure there's plenty of love here for the Exclusive Bretheren.

Crazy jewish sects.

Crazy Hindu sects

Plus muslims are the flavour of the month now, but even then, they could be subdivided up into 100's of sub-cultures, some okay, some not.

The yanomami culture in the amazon have a pretty poor reputation.

and there are probably dozens or 100's more .
 
I get to look upon some of the most beautiful people ever to grace this planet, if I visit Dandenong, and am privileged to see those Nigerians who are doing their shopping at the same time as me.
Must be slim pickins in Gippsland if youre going to Dandenong to find some talent.
 
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skilts

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Must be slim pickins in Gippsland if youre going to Dandenong to find some talent.
Slim? Anorexic is closer to the mark.

Thanks for the reminder of the lovely 'Slim' Pickins, an actor who always makes me think of 'Chill' Wills. He's the one singing bass and yodelling in this delightful clip. Really just an excuse to post this clip. As if I needed one.
http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/581069/Way-Out-West-Movie-Clip-Commence-To-Dancing.html

'Slim' rode the atom bomb to the ground in the last scene of Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove.
 
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medusala

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We live in a globalised world, absorption of other cultures into our own is inevitable. Call it multiculturalism, call it whatever you like, there's no avoiding it.

We can absorb technology / ideas from abroad and culture. We always could. Printing press has been around a while. We even have the interweb now.
 
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Multiculturalism, is a good thing because it prevents the rise of segregation and disillusionment of people based on ethnic backgrounds.

One only needs to look at the world's many many examples of what happens when countries don't promote the mixture of people from various ethnic backgrounds.

For the backwards hicks here having a hard time grasping what I'm saying, there's a key difference between immigration and multiculturalism.

Immigration see's people come to this country.
Multiculturalism is the policy in place that address how they are dealt with once they're here.

Without multiculturalism whilst having people from various backgrounds (which we've had for over two centuries for those from backwaters parts of aus, even the scary Muslims you're so afraid of were here before the last surge of ten pound poms) eventually ethnic divides become so great society doesn't function, entire groups are frozen out of education, employment and public service. This leads to a fundamental breakdown internally leading to mass unemployment, violence and riots. Eventually it leads to gross massacres and the possibility of civil war.

This has been recorded so many times that it's not conjecture it's fact, different ethnic groups can not exist in one place without presenting a peaceful unified front that in modern society is called a multicultural policy.
 
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I love a good Sydney Bloods rant about race politics.

Eh air con at work is stuffed it's like 40 ******* degrees so reading a thread which is a thinly veiled attack on "campaigners who do stuff I don't" gets more chop than usual.

This countries always been multicultural from the get go, sometimes handled poorly admittedly but this s**t that it wasn't constantly comes from campaigners who are only 4th generation or less themselves. FFS read a ******* history book. Arabs Asians blacks all came here from the day "European" immigration started.

******* backwards campaigners who don't know s**t about the countries history and seek to express their own limited view as the length and breadth of Australia.

FFS I remember a reading passage of a well outdated text book about when I was at school in the 90's surrounding immigration and multiculturalism where Paul Hogan had been lambasted, for making Crocodile Dundee. When the film was released for promoting a stereotypically and outdated presentation of Australian culture.

In His smart arsed reply classic hogan style was something about "what would you prefer an asian bloke with glasses working in an office building in the city."

The text book failing to realise what hogan was saying, presented the fact that yes indeed it would have been a far more accurate representation of Australian culture at that time. (hogan of course was pointing at that a movie about a guy working in an office building wasn't great entertainment, but I ingress)

The problem is the further away from Sydney you get the less intermixed people are generational, this is because it used cost more to get out of Sydney then to stay in it. So other areas had less immigration then the first city.

With the exception of Melbourne (which became the preferred port once the colony was properly established, because it cut short the trip and allowed them to carry less supplies making the trip shorter and cheaper) It would not be until the gold rush enabled other ethnic groups access to funds to live more remote locations.

Additionally due to limited travel and less commuter based society with everyone growing up in their own areas and living most of their lives in the one area, most people only mixed with those around them. Again looking at social issues such as funds and language barriers ethnic groups tended to stick areas that were mostly comprised of people from their own areas so intermixing in areas outside the city was rarer (other then large worksites.

Most of the places we call suburbs today we rural or semi rural had farms and we're much much more expensive. It would not be until the 1900's where society started shifting urban sprawl model and cities became more desirable that racial issues started kicking off. (reason why are various)

Around the 50's the shift to city based life in Australia really took off (overturning centuries of reason most people came to Australia, escaping the rut of overpopulated cities with low unemployment other more countries had) after generations many people from white backgrounds suddenly realised that the there pitiful patch of land they grew up in wasn't representative of society as the last influx of migrants couldn't afford to live in cities and spread outwards into these areas.

It reached its apex in the 70's when commuting to work really took off and ethnic groups started to having to mix on a large scale once again and governments could no longer rely on predominantly white areas to get elected that meaningful changes were made to refuse the policys that fed an undercurrent of "keeping the country white" (which in reality it never was) Sadly those that didn't adapt (or have the good gracious to top themselves) have lingered on and passed on their quarter acre block mentality, to another generation of *******s.
 
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The Coup

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As I said before, there's a very strong argument that our main culture is actually multiculturalism.

I just love reading your posts about this stuff, cause you get it. You're a real Australian, you understand the fair go.
 
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Australia's culture involves a lot of the following words for me:

Isolation
Anti intellectualism
Equality
Macho
Proudly ignorant
Lucky
Violent
Wasted potential

But that could be me describing myself for all I know.

Clearly you can add cultural cringe and self flagellation to that as well.
 

franjon

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Predictable.
 

thirdeye

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As for the benefits of the vile s**t we call "multiculturism", the evidence in favour is plentiful.
The economic benefits
http://www.crc.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/17479/The_economic_advantages_of_cultural_diversity_in_Australia.pdf
I wait for your well reasoned rebuttal of these points

I don't think that the economic evidence is as supportive as you suggest, particularly given the split between skilled / family / humanitarian immigration. You have posted a report from a consultancy paid for by the Department of Immigration, not the best. Evidence in the other camp is less biased and more convincing.

The productivity commission report on skilled migration (not family reunions or humanitarian) noted that the benefits were very small, although positive, for skilled migration. However, most the benefits accrued to migrants themselves at the cost of residence. The paper also found that Australians would on average work 1.3% longer hours, about twice the proportional increase in income.

Migration has a neutral to mildly positive effect on overall living standards.
These results are consistent with research both here and overseas.
The distribution of these benefits varies across the population, with gains mostly accrued to the skilled migrants and capital owners. The incomes of existing resident workers grows more slowly than would otherwise be the case. [i.e. lower incomes for residents]
Commission modelling found that a 50 per cent increase in skilled migrant intake from 2004-05 would reduce the average incomes of the existing population by 0.1 per cent by 2020.

THE emphasis on skilled migration would boost living standards only modestly, and the key beneficiaries would be migrants themselves, according to the Productivity Commission.
Overall, the report finds that skilled migration benefits Australia, although it does not assess the economic and lifestyle consequences on issues such as city congestion and environmental strain, not least because this requires subjective judgement http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/migration-wont-boost-living-standards/2006/05/16/1147545326491.html

In its 2011 Annual Report the PC noted

the economic impact of immigration "is sometimes clouded by misperception".
"Two benefits that are sometimes attributed to immigration, despite mixed or poor evidence to support them, are that immigration is an important driver of per capita economic growth, (and) immigration could alleviate the problem of population ageing,"
it says.

The third intergeneration report by Treasury, as noted by the PC:

In its third Intergenerational Report, the Treasury (2010c) estimated that an increase in net overseas migration of 30 000 per year (over a base-case scenario of 180 000) would lead to a 0.02 percentage point increase in per capita real GDP growth over the projection period (to 2049-50). While this modelling did not estimate the net effect on the incumbent population, the result is consistent with the Commission’s findings and those of various international studies, that the net effects are likely to be small.

The OECD has recently noted that
Recent work on the fiscal impact of migration for all European OECD countries, as well as Australia, Canada and the United States, has provided new and internationally comparative evidence (Liebig and Mo, 2013). The study suggests the impact of the cumulative waves of migration that arrived over the past 50 years in OECD countries is on average close to zero, rarely exceeding 0.5% of GDP in either positive or negative terms.
Immigrants are thus neither a burden to the public purse nor are they a panacea for addressing fiscal challenges.
International migration has both direct and indirect effects on economic growth. There is little doubt that where migration expands the workforce, aggregate GDP can be expected to grow. However, the situation is less clear when it comes to per capita GDP growth.

Additionally:

An increase of 50% in net migration of the foreign-born generates less than one tenth of a percentage-point variation in productivity growth (Boubtane and Dumont, 2013).

If you only consider high skilled immigration than yes they benefit, the resident population probably doesn’t and that doesn’t include environmental and congestion issues. For what it's worth these blokes go into some other studies from the New Zealand Reserve Bank and Dr Katherine Betts from the Monash University Centre for Population and Urban Research http://beta.macrobusiness.com.au/2014/04/immigration-no-cure-for-population-ageing/

To be fair, 'tis a decent topic to discuss. The evidence in support however, is overwhelming (s**t, even rightwingnuts have gotta acknowledge the economic benefits).

Tis indeed. The other interesting thing is what happens to countries that export their best and brightest (s**t, even leftwingnuts have gotta acknowledge the economic damage).
 

The Coup

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I'm not sure you can really equate modern migration levels with multiculturalism anyway.

Multiculturalism is what happens when people are already here, and Australia for all its latent racism against people TRYING to get here, has up until recently been pretty good at the whole multiculturalism thing. (The recent raids on homes in Sydney might have been for legit reasons, but the media howling and random attacks on muslims haven't looked very good, Pauline Hanson, Jacquie Lambie etc and Cronulla was bad too obviously)

Being critical of the levels of migrants coming here to work is a very different thing from being critical of the concept of multiculturalism.
 

thirdeye

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Its not necessarily modern migration, the OECD study was over 50 years, the intergenerational is forward looking 38 years and the PC report is what happens when you change flows based on skills, rather than cultures. You could say for example, if Australia only accepted migrants from one country or the same culture (based on skill levels) then yes, immigration wouldn't tell you anything about multiculturalism. However, this isn't the case as skilled migrants are taken from everywhere. What the studies will tell you, is the economic impact on Australia of skilled immigration from culturally diverse countries - i.e. the economic impact of skilled multicultural flows. Most studies are based on skilled as they are more likely to have the largest and most positive effect on living standards (although negligible), so government target them. So the studies are based on the 'best' immigrants, in a skills sense, and representative of multiculturalism.

Just thinking about the economics, if immigration is net negative/neutral/slightly postive (including distributional effects) and mean reverting (migrants become no different to the existing stock/people/society), then multiculturalism as measured by immigration, isn't in terms of real GDP per capita (living standards), making the country much, if any, better off. It's really just the flow and the stock. Put simply, without (diverse) immigration (flow) there is no multiculturalism (stock). I hope this clarifies the link between immigration and multiculturalism.

You could argue their non-market benefits from multiculturalism. To be honest, I'm not sure what the evidence says, particularly given environmental and congestion impacts. Its would be difficult to concept to measure as everybody has a different way of defining multiculturalism and the benefits, by definition non-market benefits very difficult to measure. Actually being empirically robust would be a nightmare. However, I'm sure someone (at least a reputable organisation or institution) has done it, or attempted it - just need to look for it.
 
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The Coup

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Its not necessarily modern migration, the OECD study was over 50 years, the intergenerational is forward looking 38 years and the PC report is what happens when you change flows based on skills, rather than cultures. You could say for example, if Australia only accepted migrants from one country or the same culture (based on skill levels) then yes, immigration wouldn't tell you anything about multiculturalism. However, this isn't the case as skilled migrants are taken from everywhere. What the studies will tell you, is the economic impact on Australia of skilled immigration from culturally diverse countries - i.e. the economic impact of skilled multicultural flows. Most studies are based on skilled as they are more likely to have the largest and most positive effect on living standards (although negligible), so government target them. So the studies are based on the 'best' immigrants, in a skills sense, and representative of multiculturalism.

Just thinking about the economics, if immigration is net negative/neutral/slightly postive (including distributional effects) and mean reverting (migrants become no different to the existing stock/people/society), then multiculturalism as measured by immigration, isn't in terms of real GDP per capita (living standards), making the country much, if any, better off. It's really just the flow and the stock. Put simply, without (diverse) immigration (flow) there is no multiculturalism (stock). I hope this clarifies the link between immigration and multiculturalism.

You could argue their non-market benefits from multiculturalism. To be honest, I'm not sure what the evidence says, particularly given environmental and congestion impacts. Its would be difficult to concept to measure as everybody has a different way of defining multiculturalism and the benefits, by definition non-market benefits very difficult to measure. Actually being empirically robust would be a nightmare. However, I'm sure someone (at least a reputable organisation or institution) has done it, or attempted it - just need to look for it.

Its a really well worded and thought out post, don't get me wrong....

But you can have multiculturalism without immigration. Australia had about 40,000 nations in it before it had immigration, just as an example.

And that point alone, is enough to discount the immigration argument from this thread. And I'm anti-immigration for the most part (except refo's, I want all the refo's here if possible)
 

thirdeye

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Its a really well worded and thought out post, don't get me wrong....

But you can have multiculturalism without immigration. Australia had about 40,000 nations in it before it had immigration, just as an example.

And that point alone, is enough to discount the immigration argument from this thread. And I'm anti-immigration for the most part (except refo's, I want all the refo's here if possible)

Given humans originally came from the Rift Valley (Africa) there is absolutely no doubt Aboriginals immigrated to Australia. And that point alone is enough to discount that Australia had about 40000 nations before it had immigration.
 
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Given humans originally came from the Rift Valley (Africa) there is absolutely no doubt Aboriginals immigrated to Australia. And that point alone is enough to discount that Australia had about 40000 nations before it had immigration.

What happened to mungo man?
 

The Coup

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Given humans originally came from the Rift Valley (Africa) there is absolutely no doubt Aboriginals immigrated to Australia. And that point alone is enough to discount that Australia had about 40000 nations before it had immigration.

The initial move to Australia is referred to as migration, not immigration.
 

thirdeye

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The initial move to Australia is referred to as migration, not immigration.

Migration is a noun that is used to describe the movement of people, or even animals, between countries. It is the umbrella term under which both immigration and emigration fall.

US census bureau
International migration is the movement of people across a national border. This includes both immigration (migration to a country) and emigration (migration from a country) or the combination of the two (net international migration).

Whether you use the term 'migration' or 'immigration' makes zero difference to my argument - Aboriginals came here from somewhere else (the flow of people).
 

The Coup

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Migration is a noun that is used to describe the movement of people, or even animals, between countries. It is the umbrella term under which both immigration and emigration fall.

US census bureau


Whether you use the term 'migration' or 'immigration' makes zero difference to my argument - Aboriginals came here from somewhere else (the flow of people).

Your argument is woefully s**t, is my point.

Multiculturalism and immigration can be discussed entirely seperately, they mean completely different things and relate to completely different concepts. You'd only equate the two if you were hung up on skin colour or white power.
 

thirdeye

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Your argument is woefully s**t, is my point.

Multiculturalism and immigration can be discussed entirely separately, they mean completely different things and relate to completely different concepts. You'd only equate the two if you were hung up on skin colour or white power.

OK the whole Aboriginal/immigration/migrant thing went pear shaped for you, no need for a hissy fit.

They are clearly interrelated. Multiculturalism is the cultural diversity of communities within a given society and the policies that promote this diversity (wiki). Therefore, the size, composition (skilled or otherwise) and supply country of migrants will impact both Australia's diversity and its multicultural policies over a long period of time (two maybe three generations I don't know).

Australia has changed its composition of migrants by increasing skilled immigration and this has impacted Australia's diversity and multicultural policies. The focus on skilled unexpectedly changed our cultural diversity as people thought they would come from Europe, but many come from Asia. Generally, less programs are required for high skilled migrants to integrate economically. If migrants don't have English skills that requires different multicultural policies to help them participate. People might want more humanitarian immigration that requires different multicultural policies again. Depending on who and where they come from (this is a policy choice - the number of humanitarian v skilled v family reunion) immigration will determine, to some extent, multicultural polices and the government/private resource required to help.

Estimating the economic benefits of cultural diversity (multiculturalism) using the economic experiences of migrants is valid. If migrants are not raising living standards, or have lower employment outcomes we might need more/different multicultural policies. For example, more language lessons or more cultural sensitivity lessons (I don't know). However, the experience of migrants in the economy (employment/living standards/education levels) will help determine if multiculturalism is successful. See here http://www.smh.com.au/national/fund-to-tackle-migrant-unemployment-20130630-2p5b3.html. Is tackling high unemployment within the migrant community multiculturalism?

Here is one way to improve it allow them to use there qualifications.

The Migrant Communities Employment Fund will be launched by Workplace Minister Bill Shorten and follows lobbying by Greens MP Adam Bandt, who has been highlighting the plight of migrants who are unable to use their qualifications in Australia.

The OP wanted evidence and I've tried to provide it. On an economic basis it has been a huge success or failure. So do multicultural policies need to change - probably, can we do better - probably.

The default answer to this question appears to be "they increase the variety of restaurant food" but that, to me, seems rather trivial. I've asked this a couple times to different people but no one can give me a clear, tangible benefit to Australia (eg not 'cultural enrichment', whatever that actually means). I'd be interested to see the arguments for greater multiculturalism in the country.

I also said there are other way to measure it, but it would be difficult. I look forward to your evidence and methodology?

You'd only equate the two if you were hung up on skin colour or white power.

Your a real dip sh1t. The study I was responding to was a CRC study that linked cultural diversity (immigration) to economic growth - why don't you go off at CLUBMEDhurst for being a hung up on skin colour and white power and the authors of the CRC.
 
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