Should "culture" End At The Border?

[J'Pol]

I cannot accept that infanticide is a cultural right.

To keep this simple, everyone follows the same rules with the same penalties. If you don't like it tough. You join the club you follow the rules. You don't follow the rules you pay the penalty.

One law for all men, irrespective of race, creed or culture.

This is a black and white issue, at least in my opinion.

[Biggles]

BD

The case was indeed sad and by all accounts the father was a brute. He lost his temper and stabbed her umpteen times. I think this has less to do with religion and more to do with "issues" he had over family, freak and control (any order will do). He knew he had done wrong and was trying to use culture as an escape route.

By and large, culture is something that first generation immigrants worry about. The daughter, in the instance cited, had already jetisoned much of it and was adapting to her new surroundings. This is common.

I have a friend who is a second generation Hindu and he has kept those things that matter to him. He is a vegetarian and is quite moral and conservative in my view. He is also an absolute scream down the pub after a couple of pints and is football mad.

I think the fear of immigrants should be designated as some kind of new phobia. Although we are worrying about them not adapting to our culture they are equally in a panic about their kids rejecting almost everything they hold dear. The fact is that the much larger host nation is in the stonger position.

We only have to look at those communities that have been embedded in our culture for 100 years or more. They are barely distinguishable from the host country yet, like the Jewish community, have kept their religion and aspects of life that make them unique.

Where the assimilation takes longest is where ghettos and isolation occurs. I strongly believe that it is in the long term interests of refugees to be spread into the broader community and not held together where they simply create a mini Kurdistan or whatever. The latter is perfect if they are going back in 6 months or a year but not if they plan to settle here.

I take a liberal view on most things and I guess what I am saying is that those that wish to come to a liberal democracy should bite the bullet and adapt to that culture. If I went to live in France I would want to make French friends not try and find Scottish ex-pats.

What I have said above doesn't mean that immigrants don't add or enrich the host nation just that the tail doesn't wag the dog.

[Rat Faced]

As far as im concerned, they can keep any part of their culture, that doe not break the laws of the host nation.

BD pointed to arranged marriages in the UK...yes this still goes on, however they dont have to follow that tradition, as in this country you cant be forced to marry.

I do nevertheless understand what BD is trying to say, they have enormous pressure placed on them to follow tradition, and in many cases threats from their male family members.

Riddler....

It's unfortunate that our government has such an open door policy re; immigration, as it represents $$$$$$ they can collect through taxes, etc. We must ask ourselves if we were to move to India or Pakistan or China, how would we fare by not bothering to learn their language or abide by their customs ?

I was looking into immigration to Canada not so long ago....its harder than you imply, at least if your from the UK

You basically need to be self sufficient before you move there, with £250,000 in the bank and a job to go to.....unless you have family over there already, that undertake to look after you.

I believe in the 60s Canada, like Australia paid us to go. I guess i was born in the wrong decade.

[MagicNakor]

Immigrating into Canada is very difficult. It's actually easier if you're from the UK than if you're from, say, Zaire.

Unfortunately I'm not feeling well, so I didn't read most of this thread. It'll have to wait until I get better.

[Riddler]

@ Rat Faced & Wizard....

I must be living in an area then, where a significant number of immigrants are sponsored by family members already here, wherein the requirements are basically just so; that you have a family member willing to support you.

Regardless, I came across some enlightening articles on the subject of Canadian Immigration Policy. Here are two of them;

From; The Economic Times, India Sep28/03 :

The Canadian government has, in fact, made a commitment to bring more than 300,000 immigrants each year into Canada. And now it seems the country is open for the right applicant and the government will keep changing immigration regulations in response to the socio- economic demands of the country.

From; The Globe and Mail Sep17/03 :


The argument is often made that Canada needs large-scale immigration to compensate for the population decline that will begin several years hence because of our low birthrate. This statement is misleading to say the least. According to Statistics Canada projections, if there is no change in our fertility rate, our population will continue without any net immigration to increase moderately until 2018, and will not fall below current levels until 2026. These estimates hardly provide support for a significant increase in immigrants at this juncture.

It is certainly true that immigration has benefited Canada. Among other things, it has in recent decades enriched our society through the diversity it has brought to our shores. On the other hand, activists such as Immigration Minister Denis Coderre who try justify high immigration levels on the basis of looming labour shortages are doing a disservice to newcomers and Canadians alike. My Fraser Institute paper "Canada's Immigration Policy: The Need for Major Reform" indicates that, rather than facing a general shortage of skilled labour, we probably have an unutilized pool of labour.

Despite this, Canada keeps enticing tens of thousands of skilled immigrants who leave good careers in their home countries only to face major difficulties in finding suitable employment here. Recent newcomers experience higher levels of unemployment, earn considerably less, and have higher poverty rates, than either earlier immigrants, or the Canadian-born. Worse, the vast majority of newcomers go to overcrowded metropolitan areas such as Toronto -- something even the federal government admits is undesirable.

While Ottawa has plans to try to get more immigrants to settle where the population is in decline, efforts to do this in other countries have met with limited success. The Liberal government will probably continue to try to squeeze ever-increasing numbers into the large cities as long as there are reasonable expectations that these people will throw their political support behind the party in power.
While immigration can be very beneficial to Canada and to newcomers alike, there are clearly major problems with our current policies -- policies driven more by political concerns than the best interests of either the country or the immigrants themselves.
Martin Collacott is a former Canadian ambassador in Asia and the Middle East

[Billy_Dean]

I didn't mean this post to be about the pros and cons of immigration, but the "integration" of immigrant culture, and it's effect on the culture of the host country.

I was reading an article recently about Silicon Valley, I believe it said that 40% of the top people there were from the Indian subcontinent, the impact they have made would be enormous. I certainly have no problems with immigration, being an immigrant myself, one world one people. Now, if we could only get rid of religion ......

[ilw]

Originally posted by noname12@8 October 2003 - 17:33
All Islamic countries follow sharia law, but it doesnt only apply to women, if a man is found to be commiting adultry then he is stoned too, which if you ask me is all cool  ,
and in normal countries the penalty is death for murder, regardless of what the reason is, death penalty can only be dished out by Islamic courts or normal courts, so regardless in the normal mid-east states murder is murder, with or without honour.

edit: all my edited parts are shown in bold.

yeah stoned to death thats funny
I take it by "normal countries" you mean non-western countries? In america its only a relatively small percentage of murderers that get the death penalty and in nearly all of Europe ( Australia as well i think? ) the death penalty is just history. Then theres the bizarre concept of humane killing, which even if any kind of death can be considered humane, stoning doesn't really seem to meet all the requirements.
I know its applied to men as well as women, but women suffer disproportionately, because they can become pregnant and because rape is basically impossible to prove under Sharia law. Likewise honour killings apparently can involve the murder of men, as i understand it the term can be applied to any person you kill because they are besmirching your (family's?) honour.

Hmm got sidetracked a bit there, as you may guess i'm no fan of Sharia law. I'll get back to the point. IMO there are immigrants who find that members of their family accepting western law over traditional values deeply shameful, and the fact that there is no legal recourse to the punishment they see as fit, naturally leads to a tiny percentage of them taking the law into their own hands. The fact that immigrants tend to congregate and set up small communities (e.g. as mentioned a 'mini Kurdistan&#39 means that their traditional values survive the immigration process and are of substantial importance. Looking at Billy's example the man received a letter which was basically telling him that his daughter was a whore and that others in his community knew about it. To a man who sounds like he had a fairly high social standing in his little community, that must be a terrible blow and as i mentioned the punishment his society/culture expects (demands?) was never going to be delivered. As a first generation immigrant I'm sure he accepted what the punishment should be and after days of his anger builiding things must have come to a head and he killed her. Whether it was just pure anger or whether the social peer pressure has a significant effect is open to debate, but i would rather doubt that a second, third generation or native person would act in the same way.

[noname12]

nope not normal as in non-western, normal as in ones that dont support honour killings, and I do find stoning to death funny, its a very good way to make sure no one cheats

[ilw]

Good answer, to be honest i didn't anticipate the 'i like stoning' response.

[lynx]

Originally posted by noname12@9 October 2003 - 10:50
I do find stoning to death funny, its a very good way to make sure no one cheats

Good idea, let's not bother trying to find out what might have gone wrong.
Hey, even better, we should apply this to all problems. Let's not bother trying to solve the Israel/Palestine problem, just nuke the whole area, it will save a lot of time and bother and someone else can live there in a few hundred years.