ethnic diversity? SPLIT from Sheep Station

If anyone wants to continue this discussion in person, I can recommend the Sheep Station as the venue. You'll have two enthusiastic (white male) Aussies to join you (owner and bartender, chatty) and the food is excellently promising. A bar that makes salads and tender moist meat pies? Oysters, and leg of lamb sandwiches? Fantastic!
(We went by for a drink and snack yesterday...)

Anonymous wrote:
I can better understand your point DoctorJ, but I still do not agree unless you avoid all major US cities in your analysis.

And I can better understand your point, since I read the wikipedia page on "ethnic groups" which indicates that this means something very different to an American than in non-American English.

As for US major cities other than New York: please find some recent data so we can compare numbers not impressions. For example, proportion born overseas, or language spoken at home. I say recent because five years is a long time when the immigration rate is high and society is changing rapidly.

For example: I taught consecutive years of 19-20 year-olds at a university, and the shift from majority "Anglo" in the early 90s to much more broadly distributed from across the globe by the late-90s was remarkable, corresponding to those born after 1973, half 1st or 2nd generation. It's only gained pace since. By the end of this decade, more than half the Australian population will have been born after the end of White Australia, a period in which the Australian population has risen 56% compared with 40% for the US, despite the markedly higher birthrate in the latter.

As for the thrid generation plus, which used to include myself, no matter where their ancestors came from or what tone their skin pigmentation, if they're fully integrated and mainstream society has fully incorporated what their ancestors brought, that's about the end of the story. Unless they specifically claim otherwise, on account of membership of a particular community, they're members of the respective ethnic groups "American" and "Australian" in my books, that is, people united by a common language, culture, shared history, etc. Anything less seems like a hangover from more racist times.

It seems wrong to consider someone who has an ancestor who immigrated from China in the 1850s goldrush in the same category as a someone who fled Malaysia after the race riots of '69-'71, or to consider myself the same ethnicity as someone who just immigrated from Jamaica where some of my ancestors lived, when I can have everything in common with the great grandson of a Chinaman save a very few genes, and nothing much in common with a Jamaican.

For an even more rapidly changing society, check out New Zealand: massive immigration from Polynesia and Asia at the same time as massive emigration to Australia. Some excellent (but different) cuisine, too.

doctorj wrote: [quote=Anonymous] to say that Sydney and Melbourne are the most ethnically diverse cities in the world after New York is a bit of stretch. LA, Chicago, Boston, San Fran, any large US city, plus London, would arguably be more diverse.

It rather depends how you measure it. By "ethnically" I'm thinking recent origin not race, for example African-Americans are Americans. Immigration has increased substantially under the Howard Government and is proportionally greater than in the US (legally anyhow) so the makeup is changing quite rapidly. I believe New York comes first at 39% born overseas, Sydney at 34%, London 27%, but I'm having trouble finding numbers for other large US cities. Certainly Australian cities look whiter; genocide and the laws up until 1973 saw to that, but these days you could swap Hispanic for Mediterranean and Black for Asian and not be too far off.

But if there are as many Asians in Australia as there are black people in America, how can Australian cities still look "whiter"? I'm confused. I've heard the Asian food in Australia is amazing; I have always been too afraid of the super-long flight to ever go there though.

No one mentioned Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, which are both probably far more diverse than any city in Australia. Or how about Jerusalem, also one of the world's most diverse cities by any measure. The whold world isn't just the English diaspora, you know.

Firstly: thanks Pitu for moving the thread here.

escap wrote: No one mentioned Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, which are both probably far more diverse than any city in Australia. Or how about Jerusalem, also one of the world's most diverse cities by any measure. The whold world isn't just the English diaspora, you know.

I agree that these are large, diverse cities. Can you find some numbers so we can compare? e.g. percentage of residents born overseas, or what the breakdown of 1st language / language spoken at home is? It's difficult for individuals visiting or even living in a city to see the full picture.

In the absence of a good way of mathematically defining and measuring diversity, language is a good measure because for many people, their cultural identity is bound up with their first language. And in a world in transition between localized ethnicities and complete mixing, but where few countries continue to maintain overt racial discrimination policies among those immigrants they allow, percentage born overseas gives a good snapshot of the present diversity.

The NY #1 and Sydney #2 thing I originally got from a newspaper article, which cited percentage of residents born in another country.

idlewild wrote: I doubt there's a nation in the world that doesn't have strong diversity.

Actually, I would say what that I think of as culturally diverse cities/nations, are the exception, and are limited to a few types: countries whose population substantially or primarily consists of immigrants (e.g. USA, Australia, Chile), countries with former colonies (e.g. UK, Netherlands, France) and modern centers of global commerce (e.g. Dubai, Singapore).

If we also consider those that are locally diverse rather than globally multicultural, then another type is countries that are large in terms of geography and/or population and thus cover a variety of indigenous peoples, e.g. China, Indonesia, India, Russia, but these are comparatively narrow on a world-wide basis.

Some examples of countries with comparatively little cultural diversity on a global scale would be Iceland, Denmark, Slovakia, Japan, Burma, North Korea, Malawi.

Even the concept that more than one type of culture can or ought to co-exist side-by-side within national borders is by no means universally accepted, and some governments with the widespread backing of their populations actively oppose cultural diversity.

Subject: 300 Million and 1

good bits for demographics lovers on the makeup of the USA today
(as we hit the 300-millionth person, through birth and immigration)
on Brian Lehrer this morning. The show streams/podcasts
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/episodes/2006/10/17

300 Million and 1

Sam Roberts, reporter, columnist and editor for The New York Times, and author, Who We Are Now: The Changing Face of American in the Twenty-first Century (Times Books 2004)
and
Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, founder of the Harvard Immigration Project and the Courtney Sale Ross University Professor of Globalization and Education, New York University and author, Moving Stories: Academic Lives of Immigrant Children (Harvard University Press)


The census morsel was something like 4 new immigrants, 9 births and 2 deaths every minute . . .

you want to clock USA assimilation?
the anecdote is foreign-born parents have accentless mostly assimilated children that are high achievers with higher education and stable financial situations. The children of the 2nd generation, fully assimilated, are then free to be slackers and/or go to art school.
:shock:

a very fun fact from the WNYC show was that immigrants from India to the US are something like 30,000 times more likely to have higher education degrees than Indians who do not emigrate.
(I postulate that in that case, their children will go directly to art school)

btw, i'm stuck writing USA all the time since "Americans" as a term that rightly pisses off other Americans, like Mexicans and the populations of the rest of this hemisphere. I don't mind if you do it, but I can't often bring myself to slide that way.

Anonymous wrote: doctorj's point seems to be that unless a non-anglophile immigrant was born overseas or speaks another language at home, they are just an assimilated immigrant who does not contribute to ethnic diversity of the general population.

Yeah, I don't buy that either. The ever-changing mix is what defines this country to me. But if you're a wasp, you might define the national character by the expansion in to the West, go figure.
The remnants of the mother culture infuse us . . . language (and words that are adopted by the general culture) and cultural, in everything from diet to conflict resolution.

Anonymous wrote:
More interesting is the debate over how differently societies that have large immigrant populations have incorporated such cultures, or aspects of such cultures, into their own, without wiping the original culture away or excluding members of the immigrant culture from general society.

That *is* interesting, and puts me in mind of Michael Ondaatje's "Running In The Family" where he talks about how different Dutch colonials are, compared to the English. He says the English don't mix and the Dutch do, with a full embrace. Ondaatje is speaking from a multiracial Sri Lankan point of view...

Anonymous wrote: doctorj's point seems to be that unless a non-anglophile immigrant was born overseas or speaks another language at home, they are just an assimilated immigrant who does not contribute to ethnic diversity of the general population.

Fine, if that's how you want to define it - there is merit to the idea, though I don't think it is as simplistic as that.

That is not how I define it.

What I am saying though is that there is some kind of exponential decay in how much cultural diversity the descendent of an immigrant can be said to contribute, once the wider culture has moved to embrace the new influence, and once the new influence has ceased to have strong ties with the culture of their ancestors. (Excluding some special categories with strong traditions of separation from wider society, often coupled with a particular faith; e.g. Zoroastrians contribute to American cultural diversity in 2006 but their contemporaries of 3200 years ago, the Hittites, do not).

For example:

I have a friend who is a US citizen and who has Polish ancestors, and is thus apparently Polish-American, 3rd generation. I have no ancestors who are Polish or who have even been to Poland in all likelihood, going back a few centuries. Neither my friend nor I are practising Catholics, nor do we speak Polish. We both like and occasionally eat Polish food. However, unlike my Polish-American friend who lacks a passport, I have travelled quite a bit in Poland and really like the place and its people; I lived for several years 200 miles from Poland in a neighboring country. I've brought some Polish items to the US, had Polish friends, read a little of their history, learnt the odd phrase and word of Polish and learnt some pronunciation rules, and now I think of it spent two evenings a week for a year in a room discussing weighty topics with a Polish economist. Other than surname and a few genes, why should we count my Polish-American friend but not me as contributing to Polishness in the United States?

What I'm saying is that it would be more reasonable to come up with a rough coefficient of assimilation rate, multiplied by exponential decay, by which to divide the cultural influence of the descendents of immigrants, depending on the number of generations. For example, at a 50% assimilation rate, someone who just arrived as an adult from country X contributes 1 unit to Xish-American culture. Each parent contributes 1/4. Each grandparent 1/16. Each greatgrandparent 1/64.

The reason for looking at people born overseas and language spoken at home is that this is a first (and large) step towards quantifying cultural diversity; some numbers that might be easier to come by than getting everyone's family trees back 3 generations and crunching the numbers. I'm not saying that those measures are the be-all and end-all. But if we don't even know where people were born, the largest single influence, it's hard to start ranking world cities in terms of diversity.

More interesting is the debate over how differently societies that have large immigrant populations have incorporated such cultures, or aspects of such cultures, into their own, without wiping the original culture away or excluding members of the immigrant culture from general society.

That's also an interesting (but very separate) question. We only have a very few historical examples and models to choose from, vs. a large number of countries that are head-in-the-sand or reactionary at this point, since globalization is in its early days. Going further back into history, mass-migrations usually involved unrest, war, genocide, and so on. As I understand it, there are three basic models which form the basis for policy in Western countries: multiculturalism (dominant in the Anglophone West), "all for one and one for all" (e.g. in France), and the Teutonic "resistance is futile, you will be assimilated". The jury is out on which has a better chance of meeting the challenges of this century with relative peace and harmony, but my (obviously biased) money is on multiculturalism.