assimilation

Nationalism is a domestic reaction to foreign invasion (be it militarily or by mass immigration) and the consequential displacement of the local population - real or perceived.

Foreigners visiting are guests and are welcome. But foreigners arriving as permanent settlers threaten to compete with the territory and rights of the local ancestral population - again, real or perceived. So any immigration program warrants prior approval by the local population, and sensitive and respectful settling, adjustment, communication and time and space for assimilation to integrate.

Humans are territorial by nature. Foreigners visiting are guests and are welcome. But foreigners arriving as permanent settlers can threaten to be competition with the local population - again, real or perceived. So the immigration process demands local acceptance and careful and respectful settling, adjustment, communication and time and space for foreigner assimilation with the local ancestral population.

History has shown that over time, foreigners can become accepted by the local population if assimilation is carefully managed in small doses over time. The rate needs to be evolutionary not revolutionary.

Britain's foreign invasion of Australia never respected or tried to assimilate with the local Aboriginal peoples. It is a lesson of history still not learnt in Australia.

When many foreigners arrive as permanent settlers, ancestral locals feel their territory and rights naturally threatened, like all territorial animals.

When social pressures ensue (higher costs of living, higher rents, higher house prices, jobs filled by immigrants, increased unemployment, congestion of public infrastructure - roads, public transport, schools, hospitals, child care, migrant favouritism in the workplace) such domestic fears are confirmed. Resentment then builds.

Mass immigration is by definition non-military invasion. Nationalism is a domestic reaction to foreign invasion. Stop the mass immigration and nationalism pressures subside. Read history and learn from it. Nationalism is always just below the surface in any established identifiable community.

Australia's open-door policy on immigration is driven by the short-term published yet narrow economic benefits and lobbied by those who stand to personally gain financially. But Australia's open-door policy on immigration is ignorant of the social consequence and longer term capital burden of requisite infrastructure.

Australia's LibLab politics of mass immigration is set to fuel fervent nationalism for years to come. Sydney's Cronulla Riot of 2005 was one of unchecked localised domestic resentment to foreigners.

The riot was a spontaneous groundswell by local juveniles defending their traditional beach turf from a perceived invasion of gangs of arrogant Middle Eastern immigrants muscling in. It was classic tribal territorial reaction and a regrettable chapter in Australian history. Since that ugly time, the relationship between the two groups has cooled due to concerted efforts by all parties to work together. But the underlying cause of the riot was the Immigration Department's abandonment of assimilation.

The Cronulla Riot was a warning to all national governments who choose to narrow-mindedly ignore the domestic social implications of uncontrolled mass immigration and who abandon immigration assimilation principles. If perpetuated, mass immigration and the displacement it causes to traditional populations may in future be more co-ordinated and organised.

Our politicians do not study social history and they are the cause of the problem, not the immigrants themselves. Australia should learn from the Fijian experience of mass immigration by Indians, which ended up outnumbering the indigenous Indo-Fijians. indigenous Fijian Commodore Frank Bainimarama stated that:

" his main reasons for overthrowing the Qarase government were that it was corrupt, and that it was conducting racially discriminatory policies against the country's Indo-Fijian minority. In a speech publicly announcing the coup, he stated that Qarase's policies had "divided the nation now and will have very serious consequences to our future generations".
[Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Bainimarama#Explaining_the_coup]

It is critical for social cohesion in any country, Australia, Fiji, New Zealand or anywhere that immigration is carefully planned, implemented and monitored and that assimilation is effective through to full integration. For governments to abandon its core protective responsibility of the ancestral rights of its citizenry is unpalatable in its social consequences.

Sitting Bull (c. 1831 – December 15, 1890) was a Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux holy man who led his locally indigenous people as a war chief during years of resistance to migrant colonisers in what is now South Dakota, USA.]
Read about the Native Americans

Cultural assimilation is about respecting and adopting the prevailing local ways of a place - language, laws, social values, behavioural standards, customs, intermarriage, and spatial distribution across the community, etc. Assimilation is a gradual change process.

Australia's most excessive immigration Prime Minister on record, Kevin Rudd, just gone, by allowing 300,000 immigrants into Australia in 2008 denied any chance of assimilation.

The idiom 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do', is an instructive guide applicable to any land - Australia, Kosovo, Mongolia, Tibet, Saudi Arabia, not just for visitors, but especially for immigrants. A country has no obligation to change and adapt to suit those from foreign soils. Indeed, immigrants have an obligation to be humbly grateful to their new host country and their new hosts. That gratitude deserves the respect of accepting the local ways, not seeking to change them.

Respecting locals, local rights and local values is akin to respecting one's elders - an underpinning principle of all human societies. Those that arrived first have highest moral claim. Nobody has greater right to a place than where they are born. No-one has control where one is born - as such birth rights morally prevail over non-birth (immigrant) rights; indigenous rights morally prevail over immigrant rights.

Where this lore has been savaged through human history is by the use of armed conflict.
That human history has been dogged with rape, pillage and plunder does not make it morally right that it should be repeated. Local rights morally prevail. This is a universal right deserving not just of the human world but also the natural world.

Immigrants rejecting cultural assimilation with the local population are unwelcome invaders by definition. Newcomers by rejecting adoption of the local culture, are disrespectfully asserting an unjustified claim to establish and impose a foreign culture. It is an invasion, albeit short of armed conflict, or what colonists euphemistically term 'annexing', but arguably that is one of the few differences.

Immigrants seeking 'a new life' in Australia or New Zealand have a moral obligation to respect and adopt the ways of life of the local inhabitants, not to impose their foreign ways of life upon their new hosts.

Both Australia and New Zealand immigration policies have historically performed a disservice to both the local population and immigrants alike, by abandoning immigrants in the assimilation process. By ignoring the full cost of assimilation under the cloak of multiculturalism, successive governments may have kept their quarterly cash books in the black, but let the social costs soar. Government immigration responsibility stops not at the airport arrivals gate but after assimilation.

The British were unwelcome invaders when Cook landed at Poverty Bay New Zealand in 1769 and then at Botany Bay, Australia in 1770. Subsequent exploitation, colonisation and mass murder in these islands by the invaders was wrong and immoral and indigenous generations have remained aggrieved and downtrodden ever since. Both histories are of violent invasions of native peoples lands. History cannot be undone, but must not be repeated. The current indigenous peoples remain complex open wounds awaiting healing.

With history unchangeable, it would take many more generations to come to achieve acceptable conciliation by the respective indigenous peoples. This unresolved conflict has a higher priority than adding to the problem with new immigration waves - and that is even if a genuine conciliation process was to start now.

But the national identity problem faced by both New Zealand and Australia stews at the psyche mainly because this process has not even started. It is symptomatic of the national immaturity of both nations.

Instead history has been successively repeated - immigrant wave after immigrant wave. The problems have been compounded because of the lack of assimiliation.
Enclaves of ethnic migrants have cemented themselves and more recently been exacerbated by short-sighted concepts of multi-culturalism, addressing skills shortages, fueling economic growth and allowing massive influx.

It is the disgrace of both these nations that generation after generation they shun conciliation with their indigenous, while generation after generation both nations perpetuate the fragmentation of their societies by encouraging migrants bringing 'old country' baggage with them. Seeking a 'new life' in a new country means just that!
Perhaps New Zealand as always leads Australia in some respect as it questions the 1840 multiple versions of the Treaty of Waitangi and M?ori-P?keh? relations in Aotearoa New Zealand. Australian Aborigines have not yet been offered a treaty. [Read More]

As the immigration wave cycle is allowed to continue without assimilation, the largest populations of the world will ultimately swamp both nations, overwhelming locals, local rights and local values, ultimately with their own. As both New Zealand and Australia are democracies, once the migrant number reach majority, migrants will be in politics and power. Locals will become downtrodden and ultimately extinct like the Thylacene and Moa.

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Related articles and comments on CanDoBetter on this issue:

Multiculturalism is more an effect than a cause In " How Immigration is Leading Us Down The Road To Sarajevo", Frank Hilliard writes: "Supporters of mass immigration often point to the past success Canada had in assimilating newcomers into Canadian society. They say by the third generation most immigrants are thoroughly Canadian in thought and action. To these proponents, there is no need to change our open-door immigration policy because it’s been, in their view, a roaring success. Unfortunately, what was true in the past is often not true now and may not be true at all in the future. Some newer immigrant groups don’t want to assimilate and prefer to remain distinct." http://www.immigrationwatchcanada.org/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_u... I would question the last statement. The self-appointed advocates and ethnic power-brokers of newer immigrant groups don't want them to assimilate, nor do the politicians who find it convenient to bus in ethnic voting blocs into nomination meetings or manipulate them for electoral purposes. In my experience, however, immigrants themselves very much want to participate in mainstream society, but are unable to do so. Why? Most of them are too damn exhausted trying to put food on the table. They have the will, but neither the time nor the energy to participate in much of the public activity around them. Even the 20% who have skills often do not find jobs to employ those skills---just like many educated native-born Canadians. Consequently they must work longer hours on lower incomes to keep their heads above water. It usually takes a decade before the average immigrant achieves the average Canadian income. As has been the case for more than a century, too often it is their children who act as interpreters for what is occurring in Canadian society at large. As I wrote before (http://candobetter.org/node/2007) , ethnic enclaves should be seen more as life rafts than defiant fortresses against assimilation. Case in point. My great grandparents came to Canada with every intention of learning English and following local customs and laws. But seeking the support and job opportunities offered by those from their homeland was a necessary stepping stone to eventual integration into Canadian society. Then once on their feet, and finally fluent in English, they were able to move out of the Scandinavian area of town to a bigger city with a dearth of people of their former nationality. Now, as then, I would submit, the pace of assimilation is governed by economic considerations---not by any stubborn or recalcitrant refusal to embrace the dominant culture. We have imported a slave labour caste to provide services which we want on the cheap, and for which employers in a competitive market, either will not or cannot reward with a living wage. Thus most immigrants cannot earn the $25,000 in annual income that government requires before tax revenues offset the costs of services provided to them. Mass immigration is essentially a corporate welfare scam, and multiculturalism a de-facto apartheid strategy to build walls between people who might otherwise unite to challenge the system. Mr. Hilliard argues that the high volume of immigration, drawn as it is from “non-traditional” sources, grows cultural ghettoes and in tandem with the prevailing ethic of cultural relativism---the philosophical underpinning of Official Multiculturalism---makes it possible for immigrant groups to more effectively lobby for the acceptance of practices like genital mutilation, the stoning of adulterers, polygamy, child marriage and the like--- practices that are lawful in their homelands. But against this centrifugal force to bind with what is traditional is a very real countervailing impulse, particularly among the younger generation, to join mainstream society. There is both a “push” and a “pull factor” at work. While ethnic power-brokers are attempting to pull their flock closer to their orbit, most immigrants feel pushed outward by a desire to grasp the wider opportunities that await them beyond their cultural cocoon. After all, immigrants, almost by definition, are people who are willing to leave their comfort zone to grasp for opportunities. Leaving one’s homeland is the ambition of risk-takers. The growth of an ethnic enclave in itself is not decisive in impeding assimilation. What is critical is the ability or inability of an immigrant population to join in on the cultural and political life of the nation as a whole. A sixty-hour work earning inadequate wages is a greater stumbling block to this possibility than an ideology which counsels minorities to maintain a separate cultural identity. Cultural relativism is a rationale for what corporate capitalism most wishes. It only attempts to legitimize the plurality of manufactured solitudes. As Bob Birrell, Robert Putnam and other academics have documented, the mutual isolation of contending sub-cultures erodes trust and volunteerism, two vital ingredients of civil society, thereby helping to create a society of consumers from what was formerly a society of citizens. Consumers behave as the atomized agents of the economic system, but citizens see an obligation to deliberate and decide the course of society. Corporate capitalism is fettered by the active participation of citizens, but left foot-loose by politically inert and self-absorbed consumers. Diversity may impede cross-cultural communication and solidarity, but it never inhibits cross-cultural congregation at the local shopping mall. Multiculturalism, seen in this light, is merely useful to the power elite. A means to an end, but not an end in itself. A moratorium on immigration, higher minimum wages and union-friendly laws to bring this class under collective bargaining protection would go a long way to undercut the opportunity and incentive to displace more expensive indigenous labour with that of foreign-born workers. Multiculturalism is not the root cause of cultural fragmentation, but a cloak for a more sinister economic agenda which celebrates cultural diversity as it rings the cash register and counts the profits. Let's not confuse cause with effect, or needlessly alienate those who are even more a victim of growth-madness and balkanization-by-design than we are. Let's not make immigrants the easy recruits for the growth lobby who use their fake enthusiasm for “cultural diversity” as a political battering ram against sustainable population strategies. Most who emigrate do so to create more opportunities for their children, and therefore have the potential to understand that is their children who will suffer most from an inflated labour pool and an unsustainable population level that will diminish their share of available resources. Tim Murray July 26, 2010

Thursday 9th August readers of the Italian papers were awakening to 'wonderful' news: the 'crisis' of the empty cradles is coming to an end, at least in the industrial area of Lombardia, north/west of Italy.

Men also breed

In spite of the economic crisis, women have started to breed again. By the way, I don’t understand why we refer only to women, as men are extraneous to births. Maybe we should rather refer to : couples ?

The news, which I want to share with you all, is that storks have been very active between July and August this year: there’s’ been an unexpected influx of babies. The official statistics counted 4000 new babies, fortunately boys more than girls (have we contracted the Chinese syndrome?). It’s a record! The feared demographic decline is yesterday’s history: now we can look forward to a more crowded future.

Another hole in demographic transition dogma

Contrary to the prevalent dogma, the new trend is concurrent with a depression in the economy, which should- in theory- give rise to a mode of pessimism not conducive to breeding, which is an optimistic sort of activity. Statistical analysis concur in concluding that young people cannot find jobs or housing, prerequisites for create families and prefer to take the last advantage of the willing Mama’s care.

Muslim immigrants barred from education

Well, immigration helps to explain the upward trend. The disparate ethnic groups that animate our urban landscapes, have one unifying trait: a tradition of large patriarchal families, which preserve the role of womanhood as breeder. Indeed, the Muslim wives, who are the most numerous ethnic group, have no life outside the home and have no use for learning Italian as any form of education is barred from them.

Besides, immigrants found better opportunities in the new land and see in the birth of children the fulfillment of sacrifices and hopes.

Indeed, in 2007 in the northern city of Milano, there were 9156 Italian children and 2709 from immigrant parents. The more numerous of them are Egyptians, Philippinos, Chinese. And the wealth of such variegated multi-ethnic society is represented by 65 nationalities.

Italian birth rate affected by immigrant competition?

Maybe spurred by competition or the forces of example and imitation, Italian households are also participating in this newfound fecundity. Economic recession, social difficulties, the costs of raising a child, were presented as factors that lately have limited the Italian fertility rate, ignoring previous theories ( the demographic transition) which explained that couples, dazed by the lure of wealth and sexual liberation, choose to produce fewer children.

It may be time to deviate from concentrating on a purely economic vision for human behaviour. The new demographic growth may reflect different needs: deliverance from material constraint and the the search for affective relationships .

Economists optimism misplaced

I do not share the demographers, politicians and various commentators’ optimism for the current demographic growth.

It has more than one negative result: beside the inexorable environmental damage imposed on an already hyper-dense landscape, whose ecological degradation dates back to the first human settlements. It will mean social/cultural and economic consequences. It will create on the one hand a fractured society, and on the other, a growing demand for more government – assisted measures: bonuses, more nurseries, flexibility of working hours for women.

Do not get me wrong, I have nothing against immigrants. There are numerous criminals among them, but the majority are hard working people, more so than the locals. I am not impressed either with different skin colour.

And I have nothing against children: I love them, I am a sucker for the smile of little babies.

These are brave and generous sentiments.

Invasion by any other name, such as Babel

But a massive, though peaceful, invasion of people, who have diverse hygienic habits, customs, ethics, degrees of instruction, etc., differ not only from us, but also from each other, and cannot be easily absorbed into the fabric of the receiving society. God, so the story of the Babel tower goes, destroyed an ancient civilisation by confounding the languages, (Confusion of Tongues) to the point that nobody understood what the others was saying, and therefore couldn’t live together.

This is a powerful metaphor, used by the language critic George Steiner, for incommunicability of culture, which reflects the cultural and social disintegration of Italian society– and perhaps in a not-far-off- future, the whole of Europe . It is not the fault of the immigrants. After all, if you think that your life would be better off somewhere else, why the hell should you worry if your arrival is disrupting someone else’s life, so long as yours is comparatively improved?

It is up to the Italian government to regulate this disorderly influx reminiscent of a new Babel Tower, where not only languages are at odds with each others, but the thought processes which these languages define are out of line with our millenary culture. It is a sort of cupio dissolvi, a death wish, that inspires confused Italian legislation. The Government is not sure if and when and how it should accommodate such a growing number of immigrants.

Ancestor amnesia and Levi Strauss

Sadly, it seems that we do not believe anymore in our cultural heritage. The revolution of political correctness has swept away layers and layers of awareness and pride . The anthropologist Levi Strauss’s influence has successfully brainwashed us by tales that our Western civilisation is no better than the customs of a primitive tribe. The education of our children has become a shameful, perfunctory exercise, where programs change continually, teachers are badly paid and below standard, discipline inexistent and teaching is no more the way of connecting the past with the present. The interpretation of globalisation, as a sort of badly digested accumulation of generalised knowledge cribbed from the Net, where even the language has undergone a standardisation of vocabulary and syntax, is culminating in a void: we do not know who we are. On top of this dissolution of national identity, we receive industrial doses of institutionalised jargon and clichés. The unregulated arrival of people, who know nothing about our past traditions, is disastrous in a country like Italy, which, after many colonisations, already has such a weak sense of identity.

To be more specific: What will be the fate of our monuments and works of art, in the hand of semiliterate incomers of such alien backgrounds ?

Decline of teaching standards and rewards

Of course, everybody has a potential educability; but there are classes, as in the Milano hinterland, composed by a majority of children of foreign origin, and the Italian teachers themselves have no confidence in the value of own culture, confused between the notion of preserving the children’s ethnic diversity, and the need to prepare them to be Italian citizens: what will happen next ?

Secondly, the other dangerous development of the baby boom is the ever-expanding request for state-help in the “free” choice of motherhood.

Feminism

Here I step into another minefield, even hotter than the subject of immigration - feminism.

We have been told – another tale- that women who work do not make babies. Female education was presented as having triple benefits: 1) it liberated them from inferior status and offer them the same intellectual freedom , 2) it was good for the economy ( Okay, old-style economy) ,3) and it was the best contraceptive. According to these views: ” … a high return to a female market world generates high participation, a lower demand for children and higher attainment for these children” (Population Matters, Oxford University Press).

Unfortunately, the reality is different, because the state has decided to interfere in the working of the “invisible hand”.

Statistical evidence contradicts such beliefs. In France, for example, the high participation of women in the workforce – 60,6% of women are working- has resulted in a bigger contribution to the demographic growth. The equation is: more births = more women at work. Sociologists and demographers are banging their heads over this phenomenon, which contradicts all received ideas. Finally they found out why: France’s government spends for the family 2,8% against only 1% by that mean Italian government. Entire pages of Italian newspapers are dedicated to this discovery, which represents a humiliating set back for Italy in the rivalry with its neighbour, which has achieved the record among European countries of 800.000 newborns a year. It doesn’t matter if half of the children are born out of wedlock- this is a problem for later, when the cute babies, reach adolescent status and start rioting, taking drugs and wielding knives.

The 'international' Anglophone press, posing as if they were actually relaying official EU policy, have for some time pretended that a democratic competition is underway among European countries, concentrating on who gives the best deal for working women, as such policies will result in puffing up their GNP and a parallel increment of the future workforce.

They imply that the European Union has one stated objective: two mandatory children per woman. In Italy we have finally reached 1,34 (thanks to immigration!). This corporatised media complains that we are still at a primitive stage, as regard support of working mothers. We want the same French treatment: long paternity and maternity leave, nurseries a gogo’, fiscal deductions according to the number of children, more deductions for education , A godsend. A child becomes a family business, a financial investment. But a burden for the State and its citizens. I do not know why I should pay for other people’s expenditure, which as result, will only damage the environment where I live.

If having babies is a free choice, it is the responsibility of those who made them, not mine.

A child is not a toy or a status symbol. It is a job imbued with absolute dedication to the emotional formation and happiness of a human being The first years of a child’s life cannot be delegated, especially not to a state-paid practitioner, because the child’s sense of belonging and affective development will suffer. Children’s experiences last a lifetime and parents have the duty of caring for them, during the most vulnerable period which takes place before six. Those are most critical years for neurological development.

Baby brains

Australian psychologist Steve Biddulph, author of Raising Babies: Should Under 3s Go To Nursery? advocates that parents should stay home with their kids for as long as possible, because the brain grows in response to love and affection.

If a woman will find that to stay at home looking after a small child is not her calling, if she feels frustrated, bored, and it is not able to see the beauty and interest inherent in her function, she should not have children. If the government offers her all sort of facilities, in order that she can have her cake and eat it, well, the result is that we will have more and more children. Children relegated in nurseries across the country, looked after by other women, maybe from immigrant minorities that offer themselves at low wages, in an endless circular motion of mothers-children-mothers of other children who are looked after by other mothers … the whole economy expanding and swell at the cost of a child’s psychological deprivation.

Il Fattore D

In his new book Il Fattore D”, Maurizio Ferrera, professor of Political theory of Milano University, lays down the economic program for female workforce expansion: the GNP. Every woman entering the labour market will create another 15 places in the sector of family help and correlated functions. Other women, of course. The employment of 100,000 women will create therefore another 15,000 more employees, and at the same time it will inflate the GNP by 1/3. Has anybody thought about all the series of consequences derived by certain profound social changes ? The law of the unexpected consequences is always at work.

Now, I know that many will object: poor women won’t be able to have babies. I suggest some stay-at-home voucher for poor families who would devote themselves to bringing up a child for the first years of its life, in exchange for further part time education of the mother, after the child is at school.

Instinctive

But the urge to reproduce is instinctive and doesn’t need too many incentives.

Lately, Robert Engelman of the Worldwatch Institute wrote a book, with the hopeful title: “What women want”: hopeful because it assumed that they wanted fewer children. But what if they want more of them ? A man never knows. In old Europe, already full to the brim and soon to be overflowing, it looks like we will see the awakening of that dormant impulse, which will dumfound all the sages’ predictions.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

This commentary on Mark Krikorian's latest book on immigration is typical of James Schipper's fresh and independent outlook. He shows the problem of assimilation from a different angle. It is not simply a matter of "too many too soon". Other factors come into play as well. Why is integration of newcomers important from an environmental perspective? Dr. William Rees, co-author of Our Ecological Footprint, said that social cohesion will be necessary to meet the upcoming ecological challenges that will face us. - Tim Murray

Hello. I just received and started to read “The New Case Against Immigration” by Mark Krikorian. His central thesis is that mass immigration is undesirable, not so much because immigration today are quite different from those in the past, but because the US and the world are different.

One difference that he mentions is that modern means of communication and transportation make it much easier for immigrants to remain in contact with their country of origin and practice what he calls trans-nationalism, which hinders their assimilation.

I think that the problem of trans-nationalism is vastly overstated. What matters more for purposes of assimilation are the frequency of contacts between immigrants and the natives of the new country than those between immigrants and their country of origin.

Let's take two Polish immigrants: Karol and Tadeusz. Both speak Polish at home, are members of a Polish club and a local Polish Catholic church, phone Poland twice a week, e-mail people in Poland regularly, read Polish newspapers on-line, receive a Polish TV channel at home and visit Poland every summer for 4 weeks. We can say that they have not been cut off from Poland.

Karol lives in a Polish-dominated neighborhood, his co-workers are mainly Polish and his children go to a school where over 50% of the pupils are children of Polish immigrants. Tadeusz, by contrast, lives in a neighborhood which has only a few Polish families, his co-workers are all non-immigrants and his children go to a school where there are only a few Polish children. I would say that Tadeusz is subject to constant assimilatory pressure because for 48 weeks per year most of his contacts outside the home are with natives. The same applies to his children.

It may be useful to make a distinction between additive assimilation and substitutive assimilation (my terms). With additive assimilation, the immigrant masters the language and culture of the new country without losing those of the old country. With substitutive assimilation, the language and culture of the new country replace those of old country.

I don't see a problem with additive assimilation as long as it is not carried forward to the second, third, fourth, etc generation. Of course, this refers only to objective assimilation, that is, mastery of the language and familiarity with the culture of the new country. Subjective assimilation, that is, going native, feeling like natives and identifying totally with them, is another matter. I would say that very few adults immigrants, regardless of circumstances, attain full subjective assimilation.

It should be pointed out that modern means of communication can also favor assimilation. TV and radio from the new country can enter the immigrant home at each hour of the day. I know a Greek woman whose TV watching essentially consists of a channel from Greece. When I asked her once whether her children watch that channel too, she laughed. "Are you kidding", she replied. This woman speaks nearly perfect English, so seems to be a case of additive assimilation.

In Paraná, my home state in Brazil, there were dozens of Polish colonies, many of which remained Polish for over a century. This occured, not because those Poles had such frequent contacts with Poland, which of course they didn't, but because they had such infrequent contacts with native Brazilians. They tended to live in largely self-sufficient rural communities with their own church and school.

In Southern Russia, the Germans imported by Catherine the Great in the second half of the 18th century resisted Russification for many generation.Mind you, many if not most of them were Mennonites. In Eastern Europe, many Jews lived in separate Yiddish-speaking communities for several centuries. I would say that those three examples illustrate the importance of contacts with the host population for assimilation.

One important difference between the world today and the world of 1900 is that schooling is much more prolonged. This favors rather than hinders assimilation. When children of immigrants have to spend 12 years in schools of the host country, they are are subject to constant assimilatory pressure, unless the children from one immigrant group are the overwhelming majority at the school.

It is generally assumed that Hispanic immigrants in the US are the least assimilated. If that is true, it isn't because they have more frequent contacts with the homeland than other immigrants but because their large numbers and their concentration in a few states allow them to have contacts mainly with their own kind.

The lesson in the above is very simple. If you want your immigrants to be assimilated, don't import too many of them from one country or from countries that are similar, such as the Spanish-American countries.

James Schipper is a resident of London, Ontario (August 2/08)

Submitted by Tim Murray, Director Immigration Watch Canada www.immigrationwatchcanada.org