The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent
vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums
here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules
document is now in effect.
The integration of immigrants and forced secularism, how far is too far?
Posts
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
You can be interested sure, but that's not the same thing as growing up in it, and it's certainly not the same as being a part of it. You can leave whenever you want? Well that's certainly part of American culture. We love telling people you can become like us or GTFO. You can also bootstrap or GTFO. Ain't nothing more American than that.
Corporations are at the top of our food pyramid. It's the new culture of the corporations that you need to pay attention to.
Christmas is as religious as you want it to be. At this points, it's as much a cultural thing as anything. It's as religious as Thanksgiving.
American culture is routinely left by Americans. We're the top country in obesity and anorexia. All of our holidays have terrible adherence compared globally. And since the 1920s, we've been recursively following counter culture vs. counter-counter culture vs. counter-counter-counter culture etc. Even the idea of corporate culture is going out of vogue as soon as we recognize it. It would be a challenge to find a country less ritualized or grossly ignorant of its own customs. Try to say the phrase "We Americans _______" without throwing up a little in your mouth.
If we all sat down and had a talk about what to allow and what not to allow, it would be some sort of badge of honor that it would take longer to come to consensus here than in most other nations whose populace can at least agree on something.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Furthermore, such documents that don't show what you look like, are poor at showing what you look like.
I do take a holiday on Christmas (nationally mandated, nothing against working through it if i get paid overtime), no religious significance, just an excuse to get together with family, have a huge meal and watch the sprogs (not mine, sisters) get overworked about their presents.
Every culture is shaped by religion, it's an unfortunate side effect of most of the people being religious to some extent (even more so further back you go in time), that does not make it any less ridiculous to believe in shit that have no evidence what so ever backing it just because your parents/culture told you should.
Any religious garb or symbol should not be something an employer can require an employee wear/not wear unless the business can prove the garb interferes with the business or is a safety hazard. An office can't say that a desk worker cannot wear a turban for instance, but a machine shop should be able to.
EDIT: That's assuming that I understand turbans. I've never actually worn one, so I'm not sure how much of a safety hazard they pose around mechanical equipment.
Less than the hair that they otherwise contain.
The bank thing is always a strange one in terms of veils. Logically if someone is strict enough to wear a veil it's unlikely they'll be using a non-Islamic bank in any case. That always seems like the edgiest of edge cases.
The UN actually found Mexico to be the most obese.
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
sikhs often wear hairnets over their beards in food-service work. i imagine it's the same for industrial work.
i saw a sikh guy on a scooter the other day and he had some sort of strange turban-helmet contraption on. i didn't get a good enough look to see how it worked exactly, but it was about the size of toad's hat from the mario games.
lots of american problems of the past few decades that have been (lazily) attributed the degeneracy, complacency and moral turpitude of american culture are now, as other nations are discovering similar problems, proving to simply be by-products of modernization.
You're talking about old-hat sovereigntists in Quebec; most of those are dust and bones by now. The average sovereigntist in Quebec isn't resentful towards Canada, but resentful of the fact that Canada is slowly eroding it's French cultural roots away and/or being outright dismissive towards things like bilingualism. Most Canadians do not speak French because it's not mandatory in school even though english - of course - is entirely mandatory. This strikes me as outrageous & stupid on many levels, looking back on how much classroom time in my youth was wasted on much less practical topics than learning my own country's second language.
The Federal government has nothing to say to Quebec because they never have anything to say to Quebec; the Conservatives have no seats and no prayer of ever getting a seat in the major population centers in Quebec, so they basically pretend that the province doesn't exist. This is a problem with Canadian geography across the board, to be honest - the country is so large that it tends to be politically sub-divided, and those areas not currently serving the interests of the ruling party (especially a majority party) are just told to go fuck themselves.
There's no fear of a secession movement at all.
This isn't a Quebec issue - it's widespread throughout the prairie provinces, and I'd hardly be surprised if it were a problem in the more urbanized Eastern provinces & islands as well (although I've found the atmosphere on Vancouver Island to be quite different, which I suppose shouldn't be too surprising given the island's location). It's a problem with insular fear of 'non-Western' (or non-Christian) culture, amplified over recent years by highly publicized violence in the Persian Gulf, racist conspiracy bullshit about the dawn of the European Caliphate as the dirty Muslims outbreed the pure white Europeans, almost pornographic 'discussion' about the ghettos in France, etc. All the wonderful things Free Speech (TM) has brought us via a sensationalist, often racist, journalism cartel. The Muslims are scary, the Chinese are going to steal your job and the Natives are going to rob you, so we'd better indoctrinate them into our harmonious uniculture. One size fits all (and if it doesn't, we'll make it fit!).
A letter was left on the scene, urging Saguenay Muslims to "integrate or go back to their home country".
The mayor of Saguenay, who recently had a run-in with the law about the prayer before each municipal assembly meeting (And won the right to continue with said prayer), claims that it's an isolated incident by people who just want publicity.
i find that kinda horrible. i mean, just the fact that it's happening in Saguenay, which is pretty far from being considered a "big city", it's deep in the province. It kinda means that immigrants who choose to live there need to be minimally integrated, otherwise, they can't really function well. They need to minimally know French, have jobs, etc...
This kinda proves that, to some, "integration" in this province means "Be a Francophone White Catholic". And the worst part is, unlike the Americans who claim that the United States are a Christian Nation, there are a lot of catholic imagery linked with Integration, even years after the Quiet Revolution... There's still a large crucifix in the National Assembly and they're still fighting extremely hard to keep it there. But, hey, Muslims better not show up to work with headscarves because then it would be bad.
There are a lot of times where i'm ashamed of the people of this province... This is one of them. it's awful how un-secular the province is and how it's trying to pass forcing accepting one religion over all others as secularism.
Check out my site, the Bismuth Heart | My Twitter
The way Americans do it!
Contemporary panic over the erosion of French cultural roots has little to nothing to do with immigration. It's far more related to things like the Prime Minister going on TV and stating that, "Well, Canada isn't really that bilingual anyway, so do we really need to keep printing in both languages?" and then going on at length about how because one specific town in Quebec has something like 80~ percent English speakers, well obviously even Quebec isn't so French these days, or things like Gilles Duceppe being roundly criticized in the media because he has a French accent (even though his English aside from the accent is absolutely perfect) and this somehow represents a double-standard during debates (even though Stephen Harper not only speaks with a very western accent but, as I understand it, his French is total shit).
lightweight
Eeeeh, every time i heard him, his French was decent, just... he has a thick accent, but it's not as bad as, say, some New-Brunswick politicians i heard try to debate in french.
Like, make no mistake, i don't think he cares very much about Quebec, and i don't like him, but his French is not as bad as others in a legitimately bilingual province... so he's hardly at fault there.
Check out my site, the Bismuth Heart | My Twitter
Not to draw this thread into a tangent, but education in Quebec (Elementary & High School) is publicly funded, both in French and English. Also, French courses/learning programs (full time, part time, intensive training, at home training, in schools, at the workplace, etc.) are also offered to non-francophone immigrants and are subsidized by the Quebec government.
Gen3 is where the kids ditch the ethnic accent and act embarrassed when their parents speak out loud while buying them a new iPhone.
By gen5 they care about their ethnic roots but it's only a passing phase, except for the one relative who seems to inherit the job of maintaining the family tree all the way back to $ruler.
*significant glance at Quebec*
That is true, and the current education system helps with this. But there is no reason why we should wait for the 2nd generation to come along when we can try and break that barrier from the get-go.
I am myself a Canadian "2nd generation immigrant", and due to the current situation in the Middle East, I've had an increasing amount of family members/friends of the family moving to Canada over the years, many of them in Montreal where I live.
I often insist on them learning French, but sadly there is often a perception of "I moved to Canada and I know English, why should I learn to speak French?" among english-speaking newcomers because they view Canada as being an anglophone country.
Those in my family who didn't heed that call struggled to find employment once they graduated not only because the main working language of the province is French, but because a huge proportion of people are bilingual (French + English, English language courses being mandatory in French public schools and vice versa), or in my/gen2's case, trilingual (that may be more of a Montreal thing than a Quebec one however).
Thankfully, those French learning programs are helping them out, although I personally believe we should pour additional money into those.
There are also 3 of my coworkers who are getting paid French courses provided by my company thanks to subsidies from the Quebec government.
Canada ranks above the USA as far as integration goes. http://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/newsroom/release/new-study-immigrant-integration-compares-and-ranks-united-states-canada-and-europe
*glances back*
It's mandatory in Ontario afaik. Or at least Toronto.
I really am being super flippant here, but I did bring up Cajuns for a reason. They trace direct ancestry to Quebec, they still speak a French creole of sorts, and have a distinct set of cultural tics that you don't see anywhere outside south Louisiana. And we've systematically taken Cajun food, Mardi gras, and the 'big easy' cultural touchstones and absorbed them into American culture. Nobody in the bayou would get all upset and declare that they need a French enclave because they're ethnically and traditionally French in ancestry nowadays.
Your study is interesting, but in response I will mention that the reason you know what a taco is does not have anything to do with Mexico. We've absorbed large populations from all the European nations in that study, some so large that there are more in the US than in their ancestral country, and it was rocky as hell but now nobody much cares outside a few enclaves and those are practically caricatures of themselves. Have you seen a St. Patrick's day parade in Boston? They don't do it like that in Galway. We've just about finished Americanizing the Mexican immigration waves, and we're nearly done with most of the non-Chinese Asian ones as well.
I figure next we'll do India maybe? What the hell, they have great curry...
e:Overreaction, forgot that tone doesn't carry well over text.
Actually Cajuns are Acadians from the Maratimes, not Quebecois.
Also the Cajuns are not really comparable to the Quebec situation at all. It'd be more like all of California were of Spanish and spoke mostly Spanish and had Spanish civil law.
We're not talking about a wave of immigrants here, but a cultural enclave of significant size* that's been part of the country since the beginning. It's like Scotland to the UK. The US has nothing really analogous to it at all.*(technically it'd be two Californias or like California+Texas+Pennsylvania)
Think of Irish immigration to the US back during it's height in the mid-1800s. Now think like 6 times that.
I get the feeling you're strongly misreading spool's post.
Also a bit too concerned about Cajuns.
Not even close afaik.
Plus, not an example you want to bring up when trying to talk about successes of US integrating populations.
I can't speak to relative population size but all of Louisiana was French and spoke French and the State maintains some remnants of French law even today. That's not to mention the Creole terms you don't hear anywhere else, the French placenames, iconography, and even religion. Yet they're entirely American and no one from down there would argue otherwise.
It might have taken a century, but both Louisiana and the rest of the nation benefit from absorbing cultural traditions into the larger American identity, dissolving the barriers that separate ethnic populations, and rejecting cultural Balkanization, particularly artificial style mandatory language requirements and similar efforts.
If this had been allowed to happen naturally with Quebec a century or two ago, the problems in this thread would no longer exist! I don't think it's ever good for a country to be in the position of enforcing regulations that provide cultural life support to a minority enclave.
Don't actively suppress them, of course... Just... No special treatment, no carve-outs, no regulation. Eventually they'll blend into Canada and some traditions will remain and some unique flavor will stick around and some will be gone and by 2100 no one will say they're Québécois because they'll mostly all think of themselves as Canadian.
Even the language... I mean, you kind of need to speak Spanish if you want to work at the DMV in Miami, but we don't mandate teaching it to grade school kids in North Dakota... or even in Florida. There's no national language here and it's better that way. English is where the dollars are, and we're busy stealing all the good words anyway.
Capisce?
Except that doesn't work because, again, Quebec is categorically different from Cajuns and really anything the US as dealt with. It's much more similar to Northern Ireland or Scotland.
The size difference (if you want to talk 100 years ago, you are up from ~25% to ~36% of Canada), a completely distinct culture from the rest of the country with separate laws and traditions and more importantly the simple fact that Canada did not absorb Quebec, Quebec helped form Canada.
For another example, imagine like half of the original 13 colonies were french instead of english. The situation just isn't comparable to immigrant minority assimilation or the other examples you've brought up.
Easy, tiger. I grew up in Shreveport & Lafayette!
Quid is right, you're misreading me.
Sure they are. You want them to be different because you feel like immigrants should have to integrate, while québécois shouldn't because they started on equal footing.
But it's not a moral imperative, it's a human process of cultural blending and integration that, when it's not regulatorally interfered with, creates wonderful results.
Like Jessica Alba.
--LeVar Burton