Wow, thanks for the feedback, guys! I am glad to be able to defend the opposite point on a good manner
While it doesn't quite speak to you point, I am sometimes sympathetic to the concept of affirmative action, but it has needlessly radicalized a fair number of working class whites, and the current American political apparatus will never acknowledge that there are other issues involved (even if the current system is more or less de facto class based).
I wish parts of this country weren't so gawdammed racist so we could have a real discussion of the issue.but I'm not exactly optimistic when half the people I know listen to Alex Jones. Given that whites are eventually going to become more of a minority as time goes by, it's probably inevitable that there will probably be more self-styled racial "leaders" and "spokesmen" from the community as time goes on.
This will keep happening as whites becomes a minority and double standards kept applying. You cannot seriously expect that preferential treatment, even if it is "positive discrimination", will not enrage even the most non-political, indifferent everyday joe. This is what the left wing refuses to acknowdegle, and it drives me mad. It is not racism, it is the most basic, primary of our own human emotions.
If the other monkey is getting a grape, we want a goddamn grape too, not a crappy cucumber. Any other argument about historic reasons, structuralism or multicultural mumbo-jumbo becomes moot in the face of that sweet delicious grape that you're not getting.
You wrote a long and interesting post but for my purposes I'm just going to quote the one line.
I read a book once that discussed multiculturalism from the perspective of the native American and contended that it was a failure in Canada because the cultures remain notably secondary to the primary (white European) culture. Essentially, the argument is that white Canadians aren't really experiencing other cultures but merely appropriating them; we get steel drums playing Let it Be and jerk chicken but that's about as Caribbean as anyone will ever get. I once read a study (can't find it unfortunately, so you're going to have to take my word for it that it exists) that looked at theatre that represented primarily black casts and how the tendency for funding and popularity trended heavily towards this kind of superficial appropriation (in this context, think African drums) as opposed to plays exploring African/African diaspora themes written by black playwrights.
The point here is that I believe that the fear over an association between immigration and cultural displacement is entirely unfounded because the majority still rules in the places with the highest immigrant population in the world. Minorities are struggling to get more representation in a country that actively claims to represent all cultures. I therefore fail to see how being lenient about immigration and, y'know, not being racist poses any threat to the culture and laws of any democratic nation with a constitution.
I agree with the affirmation that "melting pot" cultures rarely assimilates foreign cultures 100%, as you can probably see with cuisine: What we in the west call "Chinese food" would make a mainlander Chinese barf, for example. But this "not quite Chinese, not quite western food" is, indeed, different from your local western cuisine too. It is a third product born out of blending these two things (Chinese and Western food). And as it makes inroads into the receptor culture, it makes them at the expense of the pre existing cultural landscape. Which is not something bad per se, but you get my point.
There's also another hugely important factor in play here that Americans usually overlook, and that it is crucial in order to understand that feeling of displacement: Class. Let me focus into this assertion:
the majority still rules in the places with the highest immigrant population in the world. Minorities are struggling to get more representation in a country that actively claims to represent all cultures.
This is not entirely true. The ruling class is the same that it ever was, inmigrants or not, yes. But the lower native classes are as under-represented as they ever were, similar skin color or not, it doesn't matter: Two Princenton graduates from wealthy families yet with different ethnicity have more in common than one poor white southern farmer and George Bush.
The thing is that in the past, elites shared (or at least, pretended to share) a cultural link with the lower classes: Well, I am mightily rich yet you're poor, yes, but lo and behold, we're both German / American / French / whatever! We have so many things in common! We speak the same language, dress in the same way, have the same hobbies, yadda, yadda. With multiculturalism, said link is broken: It is the elites that have access to that "not quite authentically foreign, yet exotic enough" type of culture, while their poorer constituents can't. This shatters the very fiber on which the nation state was born since nationalism is afterall, substained trought folklore and common customs. Without that bond, the poor native working class feels abbandoned, and the ruling class loose legitimacy in their eyes.
You cannot trow the baby and the bathwater, and I am quite convinced that a big part of Canada's multicultural success was, precisely, to retain key aspects of its original national culture as that book pointed out.
I see this argument a lot and I can't help but feel you're conflating making people conform with our culture with making people conform with our laws. Nobody's saying we should allow immigrants to bypass consent in marriage so why is that even worth talking about? Furthermore, while selling children into marriage may not have been a European conception, it was definitely a thing in Europe until very recently so there's even less of a reason to believe that such a cultural characteristic would be permanently defining of a group of people.
Laws and culture are 100% interwoven. Hell, the first constitution, the Roman "Mos maiorum", wasn't written because they were, literally "traditions of our elders", as in "these rules are so damn ingrained into our society that we don't need to write these norms down, we only write laws in order to develope them".
It is also understandable that as the ellectorate stop believing in a particular norm, they will push for legal changes so the legislation can reflect their personal beliefs, like it is happening with marijuana or gay marriage right now. Hence why is worrying that a majority of the muslim inmigrants holds blatantly retrograde views like thinking that blasphemy ought to be punished, even if said punishment doesn't necessarily means death, and even if there are laws on place that prevents that from happening (from now).