I've had the same complaint about DEI stuff in the US. Diversity is wonderful, but you also need people to integrate. The US used to be called the great melting pot, now we don't expect people to melt. No wonder we have so many problems. People used to be expected to integrate, that don't now, people should rightly be pissed.

Of course they do, but you'll never hear about them. Opinions are given weight by numbers, not abstract ideas like when your ancestors arrived.

How do you think they look back on their forebears, who failed to preserve and pass on their birthright?

I suspect they would have preferred to prevent immigration entirely, though I cannot speak on their behalf.

This seems like whataboutism. The treatment of Native Americans isn't really similar to modern voluntary immigration and integration.

Sounds like the integration might be at effective gunpoint (threat of deportation) and not entirely voluntary.

> Diversity is wonderful

Why? You literally say on your very next sentence that it’s not - that diversity must be destroyed through integration and a melting pot.

Diversity and immigration always has a cost and that’s the destruction of your existing culture in part. Sometimes that tradeoff is worth it. But you can’t overdo it.

And getting pissed at the people that don’t integrate is barking up the wrong tree. They never agreed to that and they should be left alone to live their lives.

We should go after the people that allowed this to happen.

Mix copper and tin to make bronze, thats what people mean when they say diversity is good. They dont mean they want a sludge of different unmixed metals.

Too bad, you're getting a shitton of copper.

I get some amusement out of people who are afraid of other cultures. Having a lot of cultures smooshed together is a culture. How do you think you got the culture you have now? Pro tip: the culture that existed when you were 12 years old might seem like it's the most emotionally 'correct' but it represents a blip in time and is no more or less significant than what came before or after it.

Have some sense of perspective and you'll be less likely to turn into an old bitter man, shaking his fist at clouds.

How do you mix a culture that throws gays people off roofs with a culture that celebrates gay people?

To me it's pretty obvious not all cultures are good to mix with.

Obviously by creating a culture that celebrates gay people before throwing them off roofs.

Which isn’t terribly far fetched - apparently some gladiators were basically sports stars, with death.

Install Foxconn nets?

In response i'd suggest watching the star trek DS9 'root beer' scene between Garak and Quark.

The answer to bad ideas is not to isolate them. It's to outcompete them. The battlefield of the modern world is the hearts and minds of it's citizens. If our morality is superior and our ideas are successful, we should just keep doing what we do and let them spread, like a virus.

> Having a lot of cultures smooshed together is a culture.

This reads a lot like "everything is a social construct".

A culture is a property that's shared by the population. The absence of such a shared property is not its presence.

A monoculture is the least healthy kind of crop. We thrive the most when we incorporate the best ideas from the largest volume of idea space. We pay a price for this, in that we have to undergo the messy process of separating the good ideas from the bad but unless we're dead and stale as a culture we're doing that anyhow.

New is good, anything else is death. Anyone pining for a 'good ol days' culture is chasing a mirage that never existed in the first place and will do damage to themselves and everyone around them by trying.

> A monoculture is the least healthy kind of crop

Are you making the analogy because it sounds poetic, or because it actually makes sense? Humans are not plants, and they're not grown or raised to be killed for someone else's benefit.

If you insist on the analogy anyway: livestock are homogeneous just fine. Also you seem to be forgetting that weeds and invasive species are also things that can destroy ecosystems.

> New is good, anything else is death. Anyone pining for a 'good ol days' culture is chasing a mirage

That's what a melting pot is. It creates something new. You seem to be struggling to understand what people are actually arguing for or against.

Your comment boils down to "don't hate to player, hate the game" and I hate to agree.

There's a certain amount of people that can adapt to a place, but if too many people of common culture comes in they just hijack the place. In Canada it seems to me they didn't establish the limit properly and people also worked around it by moving within Canada disregarding the agreement that they'd stay in a certain zone that still had some slack of people they could integrate.

Hijacking deprives someone else of their rights. Living differently than your neighbor doesn’t change anything for your neighbor. Nothing is “hijacked”.

If all your neighbors no longer spoke English, you don't think that would affect you?

Obviously that's an extreme example, but other cultural differences will affect you as well.

If they all spoke a common language, I'd try to learn a bit of it. How exciting!

It's also exciting to experience ethnic clashes between rival groups of immigrants[1].

[1] https://toronto.citynews.ca/2024/11/03/violence-at-hindu-tem...

"Wow all these Goths have moved into my town, but they don't speak Latin, they speak Gothic. How exiting!"

- Anonymous Roman Citizen, 412 AD

It can be a really cool thing too if both cultures open each other to exchange languages and celebrations, but it requires a lot of effort from everyone.

No, I don’t. This is already the case in many neighborhoods in the USA and the sky isn’t falling in those places.

Also, I live in Germany half of the year, and there most of my neighbors don’t speak any English, and my neighborhood is fine. I don’t see the problem you are describing with your example.

If that’s your “extreme” example, I am curious what your day-to-day ones would be.

Perhaps it’s uncharitable but I am having a hard time seeing how this doesn’t alias to simple racism.

I didn't claim the "sky would fall". I just claimed it would affect you.

I think most would agree that it is easier to form connections with those who are more similar to oneself. Call it racism or tribalism if you want, but that's reality.

I think it hijacks the local culture, there's probably a better word, but I'm no native.

It's mind boggling you are denying the fact that having many people from the same group clustered in a "multicultural" environment has no impact on society has a whole. Of course it does, this is why we have laws protecting minorities, it's irrelevant how the majority is established (either per-existing or minority suddenly growing), the impact may be positive but it's naive to assume it will always be so.

Idk the Amish are pretty chill for not integrating. And if immigrants come and integrate into existing gang culture, would you actually be happy?

I think it is ok to just say “we don’t want poor immigrants. We want immigrants with something to offer.”

Yes precisely but the corporations asking for cheap labor did want poor immigrants with no options and the government caved and did basically no vetting for millions of people.

What do you mean by not integrating?

What is "integration" mean to you?

What does it mean to you?

The Amish have been here since colonial times and they live in their own communities and engage in seemingly cordial commerce with us “English”. They don’t even collect Social Security. They might not be integrated but they leave everyone else alone.

We don't really let "poor" immigrants into Canada. The system here attempts to cherry-pick in people based on a whole points system, with "I have money to buy a house" and "I have a $$ profession" being being points contributors.

We actually have the opposite problem, to some degree. Acquiring more skilled talent from abroad has depressed skilled labour compensation here. And acquiring people from abroad with $$ to invest in the property market has led to ridiculously high housing price inflation.

This isn't true. There are about 1 million international students in Canada and they aren't cherry picked. Basically anyone who gets into any of the strip mall colleges in Ontario gets in, and many of them are basically just diploma mills "selling" Canadian immigration status to anyone willing to pay. There is nominally a requirement to be self sufficient financially but it just requires showing you have 20k CAD in a bank account somewhere. Many people fake this by borrowing 20k to show the sufficient balance and then pay it back, and even if they aren't faking it, having 20k isn't enough to support yourself in Vancouver or Toronto for a year.

Being an international student isn't "immigration status" -- it's temporary by definition. There's a potential path to PR from there, but by no means guaranteed. I'd have to go look up the conversion rate, but my understanding is the majority of international students are returning home after, or at least that used to be the case.

Yes, many return by choice, but until the last few months, it was basically guaranteed that if you get into university or a college here and graduate, you'll definitely get a work visa, and you'll definitely be able to get a PR, and then citizenship.

> but my understanding is the majority of international students are returning home

Your understanding is outdated

Many (most?) of those community college international students don't have a path to permanent residency. If they didn't already have a Bachelor's degree before coming, I don't think they will ever have enough points to stay permanently.

This is totally wrong. The majority of immigrants that people have a problem with are poor immigrants from rural areas of India. They spend their life savings to get a college degree which used to guarantee a work visa and path to residence.

Curious how others on this thread experience this. It’s different from anti immigration sentiment in EU & USA then?

I actually think the comment you're replying to is somewhat mistaken. It's true that the majority of Canadian immigrants do have to compete on education, job prospects, language skills, etc.; but there's a sizable chunk who are admitted for humanitarian or family reunification reasons and are not held to that standard. There are also a lot of people on temporary work and student visas. I think these groups are the source of a lot of the animosity.

Here's an official government source which says that ~40% of immigrants in 2023 are not in the "middle-income range or above", i.e. they are low-income. [1] The same source says that 75k out of the 450k admitted were refugees.

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/co...

I have a BIL who immigrated to Canada and most of my family immigrated to the US.

In the US most immigration sentiment is around illegal immigrants and fear of crime. In Canada, up until COVID there was basically no ill sentiment towards immigrants because no illegal immigrants and not really much immigrant crime.

COVID flipped the job markets and economy, so people turned their eyes to skilled immigrants. Most Americans are frankly not that skilled as workers, have lower educational attainment than Canadians, it's a more rural, spread out population, etc. Plus the illegal immigration is still a bigger gripe, so they never turned as much on skilled immigrants during the downfall. Canada turned sharply and many who moved there and followed all the rules feel the anger of the population towards them is way higher than they expected (or feel they deserve).

A lot of people claim the immigrants don't want to integrate, but it's largely untrue. These are usually some of the most Westernized out of their peer groups from India already, to even consider immigrating to Canada / US. They also tend to be wealthier to afford the tuition to do so. That makes people happy when the economy is good, but it sucks when jobs are scarce.

"People from the future. They took our jobs." -- South Park

The Amish don't cause any problems. More specifically, they don't drive vehicles into crowds at Christmas fairs. They integrate very well with the rest in fact, engaging in commerce while preserving their culture.

Canada got their share of Chinese immigrants with $$$. That's how real estate in Vancouver ended up being inacessible for younger Canadians.

Yes this is where I split from my fellow leftists. I will not allow a parallel society to exist. The daughters of Indian parents will be granted the same rights as those of Western parents. There will be no dowries and no caste system.

I'm pretty sure typical leftists don't want castes and dowries. They might seem to want them by saying "let people practice their own culture" but that's just because they haven't specifically thought about those practices.

"they haven't specifically thought about those practices."

Kind of the whole issue, isn't it?

This isn't the true problem. The old and new immigrants aren't even really that different. They are mostly from India like they were for the past 15-ish years and more.

The real true difference is that the economy and job market flipped, and now there are layoffs, fierce job competition, and inflation. That type of environment makes people generally jealous and angry at others, and so there is a new focus on immigrants (when they probably haven't changed themselves much, I mean why would they?)

Like you just have to look at the distribution of immigration across different countries in the past 10 years to see that this isn't correct.

It was not the norm that 60% of all immigration was from a single country...

Additionally immigration has objectively increased at a time of large unemployment which used to not be allowed until the current government lifted the restriction on 6% unemployment.

You can have a mixture of opinions but we gotta stick to the facts first

It is not 60% from a single country, and it's not been that rapid of a change.

Here's the stats for you:

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/12-581-x/2023001/sec2-en...

Asian origin (all of Asia including China and India) has been the dominant origin for immigration to Canada since 2006, and it has only changed from ~40% to ~50% since then.

India alone accounted for 27% of immigrants admitted to Canada on a temporary basis in 2022: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/co...

Now we can stick to the facts? Will you accept the facts or no?

Source?

This sounds like a propaganda position. We hear it in the US too. It's a typical Republican strategy to take an area where they can't formulate a coherent economic or policy agenda, and turn it into a social issue. Instead of stealing our jobs, the immigrants are now stealing our cats.

>"That's because those immigrants came here because they wanted to be Canadians."

They came here for better life. Nothing is wrong with that. Country can use it to its advantage or fuck it up.

The anecdote I have heard is that the USA is a melting pot and Canada is a mosaic. I do notice when I travel to the USA that people seem much more integrated and buy into the USA culture and lifestyle. Here in Canada you just get a bunch of mini communities who do not integrate.

>the USA is a melting pot and Canada is a mosaic

Although that's what they teach us in Canadian schools, in my experience it's the opposite. Ghettos and enclaves aren't really a thing in Canada like they are in the US.

There are some remarkably insular subcultures within the US like Latinos, Hasidic Jews, the Chinese (in some places), Amish and variants, Indians in certain towns like Edison, Black people in certain cities, to a degree that exists nowhere in Canada (and no, Brampton doesn't compare).

Subcultures in general are just not a thing in Canada, it's very much a monoculture.

It was relevant when people from all over the world came to Canada instead of from one province in India

I think most of them will integrate eventually; their children will, most certainly. Everybody integrates, that's the Canadian way.

Why would that be the case?

> Ghettos and enclaves aren't really a thing in Canada like they are in the US.

I know you are making mostly an anecdotal claim, but if you compare Seattle and Vancouver, and more aptly, their suburbs Bellevue and Richmond, I think the American side is more assimilated simply because we don’t have the percentages of Chinese that the Vancouver area has.

USA used to be quite a bit more mosaic before the advent of national television.

Most of that’s left of that is place names and weird foods in some areas.

Integration is a 1st generation immigrant problem. I don't think that 2nd gen Indians (let's be honest, that's what you're referring to) have any problems integrating into Canadian culture. In fact I've noticed they integrate better than most other immigrant groups. They tend to identify with both urban and suburban culture, and aren't overly religious.

In BC, at least, it felt like the most culturally integrated immigrant group were the Chinese.