Opinion:

Multiculturalism – who is really benefiting?

by Shenali Waduge

Let’s get some things straight. Today the West enjoys coming up with theories and terminologies for how people of the world should function according to its formats. They issue blueprints for how nations should live. The West needs to be reminded that it was the West that began slavery, created white and non-white mentality from which discrimination, racism and ethnic tensions originated. The West introduced inequality by way of formulating economic systems that divided people into ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ and now to tap further into the skills and unskilled of migrants to boost their economies, they come up with the term multiculturalism which they use in other nations to forward their Western agendas that eventually lead to the doctrine of R2P and foreign invasion if that nation has the resources the West desires. Another curse is that the theory of multiculturalism has changed the demographics of the world and posed a new set of challenges that nations and governments now have to deal with.

Was there really any need to have a buzzword called ‘multiculturalism'?

Were people of diverse national, linguistic, religious and cultural backgrounds not living together already?

Certainly the West has made good from multiculturalism. Migrants have been encouraged to make a second home not for any love of ‘multiculturalism’ and if more whites were not lazy enough not to depend on staying at home and living off benefits, the influx of ‘foreigners’ would not have occurred. Multiculturalism was advanced to encourage people to make a second home – people who were prepared to work hard and be paid lower wages and perks for the same job for which a white would have demanded more. The statistics don’t lie – in 2002, migrants added £2.5 billion to the UK economy.

Migrants account for one in eight of UK’s working population and is likely to boost economic output by £6 billion. That economic boost does not come without tags for Britain or for any other Western nation. Why have governments been insensitive to the thinking of these natives who have silently had to watch their governments accept laws and customs opposite to their own? In the case of Sri Lankan Tamils – they refuse to speak the language of the 74 percent majority Sinhalese, but they have no issues in learning French, German or any other language completely forsaking their own for only domestic usage.

Intolerable levels

Does multiculturalism mean that once traditional looking Western home architecture has visibly everything that makes anyone wonder whether they are in another part of the world? Are natives not discovering that their nations are being turned into a replica of the nations these immigrants came from?

Initially it was “tolerable”, but now natives are realising that the changes they are witnessing are reaching “intolerable” levels.

In both Australia and South Africa, the Muslim population is just two percent, but Islamic influence has been such that a number of food, cosmetics and pharmaceutical items are obtaining halal certification, passing the cost to the non-Muslim consumer though how far these companies actually practise the true principles of halal sacrifice is questioned as most slaughter houses have been found to put a tape of the Quran and slaughter at a rate that meets the demand! This is certainly not the halal that is advocated.

In welcoming migrants, do natives and nations really want to give up what they once held proud? How far do they have to ‘tolerate’ and exactly what do they have to ‘tolerate’? Do these migrants really want to integrate into Western society and question other ethnic nationalities?

In place of ‘inclusion’, minorities and migrants prefer to lead parallel lives, preserving ONLY their ethnic behaviours and values. These counter what is practised in the society that has welcomed them. As the guest they should not be intimidating the hosts! Creating parallel societies who want to live and behave as they did in the nations they left is nothing that natives are likely to tolerate. Secularism for Britain will mean that in 20 years, by 2030, Britain will no longer be a Christian country and no Brit would have bargained for that eventuality! There are four million non-whites now living in Britain and multiculturalism has led to some towns completely dominated by non-whites and immigrants.

Migrant policies

Natives now find themselves not only questioning ‘multiculturalism’, but desiring to return to that feeling of ‘Britishness’ they once felt and now feel no more. However, there’s little anyone can do – migrant policies of political leaderships have come about to help their economies because natives are happy to live off social service. The situation is made worse in times of recession because even skilled migrants are happier to be paid far less than the natives with similar qualifications and employers rarely care about giving natives a place over profits to their balance sheet. Most of these migrants end up sending sometimes up to half of what they earned back home which hasn’t help State coffers either.

Simply because governments deem multiculturalism the key to solving a nation’s economic woes, does that mean that natives must silently accept and endure a totally parallel living culture, custom and traditions which migrants refuse to shed on the acceptance that they have been welcomed to another nation that is not their own? Does the £6 billion boost to the UK economy by migrants equate to mean that natives have to shut up and endure in silence? Natives are not experiencing an annual cultural exchange, but a 24x7 alternate culture that they did not ask for, but what their governments had encouraged and yes, it has been primarily due to the ‘laziness’ of natives.Numerous words are used – to be ‘open-minded’, ‘be tolerant'.... But, do these migrants think that they have come to another country and that it is THEY who should be ‘open-minded’ about following the life of the nations they have come to live in and not make natives adapt to how they have lived in their former habitats? If one goes to make a home in Britain, Canada, Australia or in Europe... should you not be living and following their customs or at least respecting their ways while practising one’s own rituals without much public spectacle or demand?

So, are the Western nations paying for being lazy by boosting their economies through the encouragement of migrant schemes using the ‘multiculturalism’ bogey? Yes, these Western nations have come to benefit politically and economically from immigrant populations and natives have gone out of their way to accommodate them into their systems, but what is the ‘gratitude’ and ‘loyalty’ returned?

Open racism

Australia is a nation of immigrants. It accommodated religions of both Catholicism and Protestantism since immigrants were initially either Irish or English. Colour was a different cup of tea and non-whites were excluded through a ‘White Australia’ policy. How’s that for open racism? This lasted over 50 years.

That policy changed only in the 1970s, incorporating multicultural policy that stressed that migrants had the right to maintain their culture and racial identity, but not at the expense of society at large.

The US does not practise multiculturalism, but there are over 310 million people from all over the world living as ‘Americans’ – thinking and acting as ‘Americans'.

Nevertheless, the demographics are certainly changing in nations that have embraced immigrants. With more people of the West following new trends of same sex marriage, open homosexuality, living together and opting not to have children, the immigrant population is seen steadily and consistently rising that the forecasts are alarming.

This is likely to soon put to rest any feeling of ‘Britishness’ to be replaced with new cultures, customs and practices and how far the natives of these European nations including UK, Canada, Australia and even the US are ready to accept this remains a big question!

Arguably, 25 years ago, no one in Europe would have thought they would be in the mess they are in now – who would have thought Europe would ever have to take austerity measures and have its people almost beg to live? It is the follies of the leaders and these very leaders, instead of accepting their fault now blame multiculturalism – Germany’s Angela Merkel has declared that multicultural society has failed, Britain's David Cameron has uttered similar sentiments, agreed by former French President Nicholas Sarkozy and Spain’s former leader Jose Maria Aznar.

If multiculturalism has failed in the West, in the nations that first started the drive, why do they insist on enforcing the same tenets in Asia where nations and their people lived in harmony before the arrival of colonists who introduced all the ills that these nations today suffer from?