Multiculturalism

Adding to information about the Diversity Visa, one of the goals of current U.S. immigration policy is (according to the Congressional Budget Office):

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"Immigration Policy in the United States" from Congressional Budget Office:

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To provide admission to people from a diverse set of countries.

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Multiculturalism is U.S. policy.

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To provide admission to people from a diverse set of countries.

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From which Jon concludes: You appear to have skipped a couple of steps in your logic. Again.Providing a legal immigration opportunity to a person from one of the few countries that doe not already immigrate here in droves (50,000 per year or more) is not necessarily multiculturalism. That is unless multiculturalism is just your code word for xenophobic paranoia.As an aside...At one time official US policy was that white people could immigrate freely. There are actually an old case from that era where the Supreme Court ruled that merely being Caucasian was not enough to be considered white for immigration purposes.

Earlier in the thread there was dispute as to whether Multiculturalism policies actually exist or not. Multiculturalism policy was defined in the OP:

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Wikipedia on Multiculturalism:

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Multicultural ideologies or policies vary widely, ranging from the advocacy of equal respect to the various cultures in a society, to a policy of promoting the maintenance of cultural diversity, to policies in which people of various ethnic and religious groups are addressed by the authorities as defined by the group they belong to.

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The U.S. immigration policy I cited is an example of a Multiculturalism policy.

Allowing a person to immigrate here from say, Guatemala or Taiwan, for the simple purpose of finding a better economic opportunity does not necessarily promote either cultural diversity or require any particular policy for treating the individual any differently. We might well anticipate that the new emigree will assimilate into the current culture.What you are demonstrating by lumping things into your multicultural pot and then railing against all things multicultural is your own paranoia and xenophobia.The alternative, which would be an immigration policy tied to disallowing the possibility to immigrate of people based on their cultural background would be intolerable and unjust. But apparently that's the kind of policy you need to feel safe. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

What does any of that have to do with anything I've said?

Your example says nothing about multiculturalism. Admitting people from different cultures does not imply promoting or even tolerating the practice of those cultures over here.

I know it doesn't. What is your point?I cited the policy as an example of promoted diversity.Don't let NoNukes' inability to read color your understanding of what I've posted.

But what you cited - at least what you quoted from your citation - doesn't promote diversity. It promotes drawing from diverse sources - like drawing water from different wells to mix in one reservoir.

That's a crappy analogy, ringo; water is water.It's more akin to drawing some pasta from the spaghetti box, some from the macaroni box, and some from the rotini box.The Diversity Visa program shows how the U.S. government goes out of its way to ensure a diverse population of immigrants.

No, it says nothing about preserving the diversity. To use your analogy, it could mean putting the spaghetti and the macaroni and the rotini into the same soup. The individuals can still be distinguished but nothing is being done to promote their diversity.

But the soup (i.e., the population) is now diverse.Obviously you can't turn a spaghetti noodle into a macaroni noodle, just like you can't turn a Guatemalan-American into a European-American.The diversity is created in the population, not in the individual.

The question is neither whether the sources of the ingredients were diverse nor whether the soup is now diverse. Your claim is that the US government policy was/is to promote diversity and you haven't shown that. They might have anticipated that the diversity would be preserved in part - or they might have hoped that it wouldn't. After all, a hundred years ago there was immigration from diverse sources but the policy was assimilation.

An article in the Guardian:Outrage as nine Sudanese women face 40 lashes for wearing trousers | Sudan | The Guardiandraws attention to the fact that women in the Sudan can be flogged (though in this particular instance, she wasn't) for wearing trousers.To our Western way of thinking, how outrageously ridiculous (perhaps cruel) does a cultural law have to be, before our objections to it become legitimate, in the eyes of a cultural relativist ?

I would suggest that if forced mutilation an laws against educating girls fail to cross the line for some relativist, laws outlawing the wearing trousers by women would not even register on the outrage meter.

Whether one group is outraged by the behavior of another group depends on the world view or outlook.Western civilization is oriented in many ways to individuals and individual rights and responsibilities, although there are movements afoot to change that to a more collectivist approach.Other groups have a different world view or outlook. If the state is the overriding consideration, individuals are less important and their rights diminished. Likewise, if religious laws and duties are paramount, individuals have to conform or else both the religious and state authorities are on their tails.Being the curmudgeon that I am, I prefer the Western philosophy of individual liberties and responsibilities, and wish the collectivists and religious extremists a total lack of success. Or, as Johnny Carson might have said, "May the fleas of a thousand camels infest their armpits."