A story was told to us long ago about culture absorption, which keeps on popping up every time the problems of immigration are discussed in the industrialised countries inundated in recent times with a rising waves of immigrants. A village yokel illiterate, wanting to have his son to be elevated to the higher cultural echelon of society, approached a well-educated high caste Brahmin teacher in a city for lodging his son with him so that he would inculcate the teacher's and his family's sophistication in language, manner, and social etiquette. The villager returned after half a year to see how far his son has progressed. As soon as the father of the boy was sighted by the teacher, he was greeted not in the language and manner of the teacher but those of the son! Max Weber's sociology, which theorises about lower culture being overtaken by the higher order was made to stand on its head.
The old metaphors for immigrants slowly submerging into the host countries' mainstream values are changing fast, as dramatised by Australian parliamentarian Pauline Hanson's strident tirades against immigrants into Australia, which have spawned a serious political crisis. The banner of her battle cry is that Australia is in danger of being swamped by Asians who have their own culture and ethnic and religious traditions, form ghettos, and do not easily assimilate into the society. Australia is not changing the immigrants, they are changing the Australian polity. Though the context is different, Hanson's outpourings strike a sympathetic chord in the breasts of the populace in other Western countries like Holland, UK, US and Canada "" the last two countries that are basically immigrant nations.
In the case of America, the analogue for Canada is not a melting pot but a mosaic "" brightly colored bits of ethnicity, culture, racial identify, and language embedded side by side. They may contrast with one another, but together they form a portrait of the nation in the same way the dots on a pointillist painting conveys a coherent image. But no longer with large-scale immigrants who are non-English and non-French speaking which constitute a fastest-growing segment of the Canadian society. They now are around 17 per cent of the Canadian population, twice the corresponding American average. Gallimaufry of languages, ethnic differences, and cultural diversities, are striking. Had it been merely that, perhaps, a mosaic could have been sustained but the color of the immigrants and the money that the Canadian government has to pour into improving their language proficiency, harden and cement the anger and prejudice of the Canadians against immigrants. Infirmities of the immigrants are of course exaggerated as
the Canadian scholars pointed out that they quickly adjust to the democratic, liberal and cosmopolitan values of the society and whatever old traits they inherit, hardly remain beyond a second generation. Yet the strictures find a ready audience.
America's favorite metaphor has been the melting pot which is now being threatened not by the immigrants sticking to their inherited culture and other differences. The reasons are complex. The founding immigrants of America were Europeans, apart from the blacks brought from Africa as slaves, and though they came from different countries and religious sects, they were basically white and their umbrella religion was Christianity, so that the immigrant population did not take long to assimilate to make America a melting pot. But the inflow of immigrants since 1960s has been from the countries in Latin America, mainly Mexico, with languages of their own, competing for the place in the sun with English, the national language of America.
There has been also a wave of immigrants from Asia on a scale never before in history. In their case, though language did not pose any serious problem, their educational level has remained far higher than the average of native Americans. The highest university degrees in hard sciences are earned by the Asians, mainly Chinese and Indians. Even more strikingly, the demographic map of America is changing so radically that in the second half of the twenty-first century the immigrants -- both first and second generation would dictate terms, in elections in certain states like California, Texas, New York. In that event, the whole definition of the melting pot would change beyond recognition. The society that would emerge is one with predominance of the tradition and values of the immigrants, with local American values playing a second fiddle.
The Western societies face a Hobson's choice. Immigration, like the flow of capital, is an intrinsic and integral part of the process of globalisation. The under-developed world is short of capital and rich with labour, while the industrialised world is flush with capital and in need of labour, so for a dynamic equilibrium, immigration and capital flows have to move in opposite directions. The difficulty arises, because labour is not a homogenised entity like capital and besides it has non-economic ramifications. There is thus reason for lament. The structures of local economies fundamentally changes with the capital inflows in the same way that the local societies would change fundamentally with the inflow of labour. All this is a non-zero sum game.
