Multiculturalism: not good

Photo credit: onlyinus.wordpress.com

American children

Many of my relatives and friends take pride in their enthusiastic embrace of multiculturalism. I oppose it because it discourages assimilation, and it celebrates cultural differences rather than common values. As far as Cleveland Tea Party is concerned, one of the core values, that of limited government, is subverted by uncontrolled immigration that expands the nanny state and dilutes our cultural fabric. The melting pot is giving way to the societal mosaic, more apt to shatter.

A Canadian contributor to PJ Media, David Solway, eloquently summarizes “The Scourge of Multiculturalism” (h/t Instapundit):

The argument made by immigration and refugee enthusiasts, namely that the Western democracies were founded and settled by immigrants and therefore should continue to welcome newcomers, is valid only to a point. In the course of time the original settlers created a national identity, a sense of communal membership in a common world unified by custom and law. It is that identity that should be preserved. . . .

I am not opposed to immigration per se, only to ill-advised and special interest agendas that would weaken and adulterate the stable domestic accords arrived at over many generations.

To say “we are a nation of immigrants,” then, is immaterial. We are now a nation of citizens. Skilled immigrants, properly screened and taking into account real domestic needs, should be part of the country’s future, but not in multiples that threaten to dilute a nation’s internal cohesion, not from backward countries whose inhabitants are all too often uneducated, illiterate and functionally unassimilable, and certainly not from parts of the world -- in particular, the Islamic world -- whose history, culture, theology and politics have ranged it against everything that Western civilization comprises. The plight of European nations like Germany, Sweden, England and France, sinking into a morass of civil unrest, criminal violence and legal subversion, should be an incontrovertible object lesson that multiculturalism is the devil’s gift to a forgetful and undeserving people.

The congeries of welfare recipients bankrupting our fiscal resources, inner-city ghettoes of disaffected and belligerent residents, the array of lawfare plaintiffs, the proliferation of de facto censorship procedures . . . and the consequent erosion of community standards are the poisoned fruit of such unstructured immigration protocols -- a scourge prettified under the term “multiculturalism.” 

. . .

There is no shame in cherishing and defending one’s “old country” patrimony and the values upon which civic and communal life are founded. This has nothing to do with an antecedent “Eurocentrism” that ostensibly degrades other peoples or with the risible canard of “white supremacy,” but with the sense of belonging to, for all its flaws and errors, the greatest civilization ever to appear on earth, a Judeo-Hellenic-Christian civilization that gave us, among innumerable gifts, the Bible and the Greek library, the magna carta, the concept of individual liberty, scientific and medical advances never before seen, and a technological, commercial and industrial infrastructure that has made life easier for untold millions.

Full essay is here.

# # #