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About Prospero Johnson: Multilingualism and social attitudes
Named after the hero of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, this blog provides literary insight and cultural commentary from our correspondents
Social capital in the 21st century Jun 18th 2015, 11:41 BY R.L.G. | BERLIN
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THE ECONOMIST, as a liberal newspaper, is a believer in globalisation and migration. We have also often argued that multi-ethnic countries should make compromises to stay
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together, rather than break apart into ethno-nationalist states. We hold diversity to be a virtue, not a weakness or failing. But is this Panglossian? Diversity is fine in the best of all possible worlds, but we do not seem to live in such a world. For example, economists have long known that highly multilingual countries tend to be poorer than those dominated by a single big language. This raises a question: If linguistically homogeneous states tend to be richer, do they get richer because they are monolingual, or does development tend to favour the biggest language at the expense of smaller competitors? A new paper* by Bodo Steiner and Cong Wang, two economists at the University of Southern Denmark, reach the conclusion that less linguistically diverse countries tend to prosper (rather than the other way round). Messrs Steiner and Wang set out to find the relationship between linguistic fragmentation and social capital. Social capital itself can be hard to define, but a few scholars have nonetheless put a number on it. Three scholars led by Dan Lee of Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea created an index** of 72 countries across criteria like trust (a feeling of societal fairness, confidence
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institutions like government, political parties and the press); norms (corruption, the rule of law, the prevalence of tax evasion and benefit fraud); and networks (for example how likely people are to join religious groups, arts and sports clubs and the like). Countries with high levels of social capital tend to be richer.
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They also tend to be more linguistically homogeneous. Messrs Wang and Steiner found that the number of language spoken in a country is significantly negatively correlated with
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social capital (see chart above; the country codes used can be found here.)
Middle East and Africa | Jul 8th, 09:55
Some countries have many languages and relatively high social capital. America and Canada are both outliers here, as immigration destinations that are also host to many
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indigenous languages. But they are also dominated by a big native language: English,
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with, in Canada’s case, an important role for another big language, French. So the authors also plot the probability that two citizens will speak the same first
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language against social capital. These measures are even more closely (negatively)
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correlated. Despite headline-grabbing levels of immigration, countries like Denmark and the Netherlands remain linguistically highly homogeneous; they also have the highest
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rates of social capital in the data set. Uganda and India fall neatly along the trendline at the other end. The authors checked the robustness of their results in various ways. The results held only
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slightly less strongly when excluding African countries, which are the poorest in the set and also highly linguistically diverse. The effects also held when controlling for other
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factors that are correlated with linguistic diversity: for example, mountainous countries,
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and those closest to the equator, tend to be more linguistically diverse. But even controlling for those factors, diversity was bad for a country’s social capital. No one factor explains all countries. Bangladesh is poor despite being fairly linguistically homogeneous. Belgium and Switzerland are rich despite the lack of a dominant linguistic nationhood. South Africa does better than its multilingualism would predict; Burkina Faso does worse. But the overall trend remains clear. What practical conclusions can be drawn? In the case
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of immigration, linguistic assimilation is important: whether or not immigrants and their children keep their old languages, they must master the languages of their new countries.
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The host countries must create the kind of inclusive society that says that anyone putting the effort in will be welcome. The lessons for naturally multiethnic states are not as clear. However much homogeneity might serve an Iceland or a Japan, other countries cannot be engineered to look like them in the real world. Neat partitions and velvet divorces are rare. Messy border wars are much more common. Ukraine’s decision (soon reversed) to strip Russian of its role in southern and eastern provinces gave Russia an excuse to fan the flames of a war to protect Russianness itself in Ukraine. This is the very thing that burns up social capital, otherwise known as trust between people, and between citizens and their state.
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Far better is the creation of identities beyond tribal solidarity. The European Union was, of course, born of this kind of thinking. Within it are territories once bloodied by ethnic rivals, now dully prosperous border regions. Alsace and Lorraine are stably part of France; neighboring Saarland voted after the second world war to join Germany. French and German are widely spoken on both sides, and Saarland teaches French before English in many schools. Or take Sondeborg, where the two authors are based, in southern Denmark. Prussia won the second of two wars over the Danish-German border in 1864. But after the first world war, a plebiscite split the province of Schleswig between the two countries. It is especially fitting that Prof Steiner should research multilingual places; hailing from the Saarland, he now commutes from German Schleswig-Holstein across the border to Sonderborg —which voted in 1920 to join Germany but went with the majority in the surrounding zone to Denmark. He says most of his department's faculty and staff are cheerfully bilingual, and commemorations of the 1864 war show no hint of enmity. The old Danish border barracks is now a refugee centre, hosting Denmark’s biggest concentration of Syrians. It is a needed reminder of the enduring peace that western Europe has improbably achieved—and which too much of the world still sorely lacks.
* Cong Wang and Bodo Steiner, "Can Ethno-Linguistic Diversity Explain Cross-Country Differences in Social Capital?: A Global Perspective", Economic Record, 2015. Also available as a working paper.
Economist blogs ** Dan Lee, Kap-Young Jeong and Sean Chae, "Measuring Social Capital in East Asia
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1 2 next › last » Oreg Jun 26th, 08:53
Switzerland has 3.5 official languages, Belgium 2.5, yet largely mono-lingual countries like Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy and Australia are plotted with higher language diversity? Yes, they have minorities with their own languages. But almost every member of these minorities speaks the official language as well. Hence, communication problems between groups will be much more significant in Switzerland and Belgium. This undermines the paper's methodology. Recommend
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Pablo Emanuel Jun 23rd, 16:43
It smells like bad statistics. Based on the second graph, if one excludes the 8 super-diverse (and generally poor) countries on the extreme right, there seems to be no correlation at all. So, basically, you just need to find a "theory" for India, Indonesia, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Recommend
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hedgefundguy Jun 23rd, 15:57
"We hold diversity to be a virtue, not a weakness or failing." Does that mean Josip Tito was a virtuous man? (He ran that diverse nation of Yugoslavia.) NSFTL Regards Recommend
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Christopher D Jun 23rd, 15:23
Thanks for illuminating an anthropological investigation using the lens of social capital as a measure. It should be intuitive that human progress should be measured by trust in one another but the case needs to be made. As noted, the economic benefits social capital and renewal of subsidiarity represent a new frontier of prosperity for everyone. This report intuitively suggests that verbal communication is key to building both. I embrace the conclusion. Recommend
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Rob S in reply to Christopher D Jun 25th, 08:15
Was this post meant to be a parody of the TE argument?
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guest-oowajwe Jun 23rd, 08:02
The reason for this is likely the arbitrary colonial borders drawn by Europeans during the 19th century. During the scramble for Africa and the colonization of Asia, the borders drawn for the most part did not take into account the ethnicity of the people living there. Just look at Nigeria, Indonesia, or Sudan. The rulers of these areas did not care where their colonial subjects lived, only about the amount of resources that could be extracted. In Asia, Pan-nationalist movements in Indonesia and India succeeded, conglomerating the colonial holdings of a particular nation into one. The borders were not drawn along ethnic lines. In Africa and Arabia, the individual parts of empires gained independence separately. The borders between colonial empires were now the borders between nations. It did not matter what ethnicity was the majority in each area, they were simply given independence within the existing provincial structures. these borders were not drawn along ethnic lines. In Europe, much of the Americas, Korea and Japan, the borders are much older, and are generally based off of ethnicity rather than resources. This is relevant because countries which were recently colonies tend to be poorer. The reason for this correlation is colonialism. Recommend
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Rob S in reply to guest-oowajwe Jun 23rd, 09:18
European borders have long suffered from the same problems. Nazis Germany's justification for war was based on protection of German-speaking people. India is probably the worst example in existence of the language divisions, rather than a role model of success. The only common language is English. Recommend
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APenNameAndThatA Jun 23rd, 04:06
Liberal? Posting in a language other than English is against the rules! Thank goodness TE is only liberal in theory, and in practice keeps things nice and orderly! Recommend
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APenNameAndThatA Jun 23rd, 04:00
"... reach the conclusion that less linguistically diverse countries tend to prosper (rather than the other way round)." If someone really could determine cause and effect by carefully measuring correlation, and not by using an experimental design, that would be a really big deal. Unfortunately, I bet that they can not. Recommend
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Jiang Tai Gong Jun 23rd, 01:21
It might be true that-> "THE ECONOMIST, as a liberal newspaper, is a believer in globalisation and migration." However, not necessarily a believer in free speech. Recommend
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Jiang Tai Gong in reply to Jiang Tai Gong Jun 23rd, 15:12
Following my posting of my comment regarding TE "not necessarily a believer in free speech."
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->> 16 of my comments/replies have been deleted by the TE comments moderator. Recommend
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Jiang Tai Gong in reply to Jiang Tai Gong Jun 23rd, 17:12
UPDATE->> 5 more of my comments/replies have been deleted by the TE comments moderator. That brings the count to 21 now. Recommend
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Nedkrafsat Jun 22nd, 21:07
A former colleague of mine refers to such graphs as Thompson plots. The may have been something in the middle but no amount of forensic statistical treatment will be able to reconstruct the object. Subject matter and implications of the study aside the choice of null hypothesis is problematic - from summary statistics and figures it seems likely that the mean of the dependent variable can explain as much of the data as the fitted models. But, as the authors have not published the dataset underlying their assertions it is difficult to verify - it requires reconstruction from a number of papers, many hidden behind paywalls, and it is not clear how the data was filtered or pretreated. Peer review, critique and open inquiry is central to science. Open disclosure of the data that underpins a study allows others to review, reanalyse and discuss based on the observations made. Recommend
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ashbird Jun 22nd, 19:53
So much is made of monolingual v. unilingual v. multi-lingual v. poly-lingual it is so easy to see the trees and miss the forest. . I think many people simply know many languages. They should be allowed to do so without being either shamed for being "politically correct", or glorified for being "politically super-correct" for NOT knowing. . Knowing more than one language is an asset of great usefulness in an increasingly globalized world. That fact cannot be denied. It is not anything to "brag about". Nor suffer denigration for. . Why does everything have to get so complicated!! . Certainly it can't be a bad thing if one knows how to read the "Toilet" sign in more than one language. What is so bad or so good about that? It is just useful. . I agree with some commenters regarding the shoddiness of both the premise and the statical analysis (or seeming "statistical analysis") of the original studies cited. They are truly substandard. Recommend
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APenNameAndThatA in reply to ashbird Jun 23rd, 04:03
Being multilingual helps one cope with poverty. And, things are complicated because they are. Prefer not to be confused by the facts? Recommend
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ashbird in reply to APenNameAndThatA Jun 23rd, 07:10
Hmm...You have a good point about poverty. I hadn't thought of that. Now more things make sense. A lot of sense, actually. Thanks!
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A. Andros Jun 22nd, 16:38
How much is the world tormented these days by national governments "forcing" linguistic minorities to abandon their identity and submit to an uber-language? It seems just the opposite is happening. Scots, who cannot speak Celtic to save their kilts, are now demanding independence. In America, we have pseudo-aboriginal "cultures" marooned on Gawdforsaken reservations in order to "preserve" their "way of life" and their almost totally forgotten languages. Result? Child abuse, alcoholism and suicides. "Far better is the creation of identities beyond tribal solidarity." Alright . . . let's go with that one. Is that what plays out these days? In the States, at least, the liberal diktat is all in the other direction: multi-everytingness. "Tribal solidarity" is what the Democratic Party is based on: separate boxes of humanity that are different colors, different sexes and have different grievances. What, after all, is that party, aside from one large bitch session? I am also a little weary of the "correlation isn't causation" crowd. My guess is that they never spent much time in business. Multiple linguistic zones within any economy act precisely like internal tarrifs and customs houses. They are barriers to communication and the exchange of goods. Let's, for a moment, move beyond language into another tribal identity -- race. One suspects that liberals almost uniformly have their panties in a bunch over Ms. Dolezal because she refuses to stay in the box assigned her. Her self-assertion threatens the whole mental scurvy of identity politics so lovingly crafted in Academia and the current Democratic Party. All social life is dependent on the ability to communicate. Communication depends on language. The less linguistic homogeneity any entity possesses the more more difficult it becomes to communicate within it. The more difficult people find it to communicate the more suspicious they are likely to be of one another. There was, after all, a reason the Tower of Babel was never finished. Recommend
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APenNameAndThatA in reply to A. Andros Jun 23rd, 04:12
The "correlation isn't causation crowd" will be keen to agree with you that the languages cause a barrier to trade. They are not anti-information, they are anti-BS. As for Ms Dolezal - you conflate two issues: identity about race... and lying about race. If she had have said "I identify as black because of my adopted siblings, but my parents are white", then she would not have caused a stir. The Tower of Babel was never finished because my imaginary sky friend knocked it down. Recommend
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MrR.Fox Jun 22nd, 16:12
"We hold diversity to be a virtue, not a weakness or failing." . Your selling yourselves short with that - you in fact regard a situation of diversity to be morally superior to one where it is absent. Your oft-stated views on this subject have everything to do with perceptions of morality on your part, and nothing to do with efficacy as a neutral, factual matter. . And that's the biggest problem with the mantra 'diversity is (intrinsically) good' - it assigns exclusively human moral qualities to non-human things like fact-situations. Is a mixed pack of dogs a more ethically virtuous concoction than one comprised of a single breed? Recommend
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Rob S in reply to MrR.Fox Jun 23rd, 09:23
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The assertion about the virtues of diversity is not unlike the assertion that God is a Holy Trinity except that there is no evidence to the contrary with respect to the Trinity. The evidence of the failings of diversity are all too common. Recommend
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MrR.Fox in reply to Rob S Jun 23rd, 10:34
True virtue in the religious sense - or in the PC sense - means always being able to get past all the contrary evidence staring one in the face. Recommend
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Postman Pat Jun 22nd, 15:02
I'm not entirely sure that correlation proves causation here. If we were to control for the number of nation states that had their borders drawn by ex-colonial powers, taking no account of local culture or language, I wonder what the result would be? They weren't all in Africa. I suspect that this is a far more significant factor. Syria and Iraq are cases in point, as they both have a dominant language, but were created by western powers with little knowledge or interest in tribal or linguistic cultures. This is now tearing these countries apart. I suspect that the multi-lingual nature of failed states is much more a symptom than a cause, albeit one with the potential to aggravate the situation. Recommend
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YgorC.S. in reply to Postman Pat Jun 22nd, 21:19
You nailed it! And monolingualism itself also means little in parts of the world where colonization and acculturation was enduring and involved mass immigrations, like Brazil and other American countries, so that social and ethnic divisions are much less "audible" in people's languages than in most "old world" countries. For such a huge country there mustn't be a more homogeneous country in the world than Brazil: even with its 170 native languages and dozens of foreign immigrant languages, almost all spoken by some hundreds or a few thousands of people, the fact is that about 99% of the population now speaks Portuguese as a mother tongue. It didn't translate in a homogeneous and egalitarian society, but it certainly just meant a previous very successful assimilation of immigrants and natives. Recommend
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robert e in reply to Postman Pat Jun 23rd, 14:54
No doubt! The greatest accomplishment of this study may be how completely and stupendously it manages to ignore the elephant in the room: the half millennia of colonial history that shaped the modern world. Indeed, even as multilingualism and arbitrarily drawn borders are often the direct result of colonial rule and the cultural, economic and ethnic arrogance behind it, stunted economic and cultural development and ethnic strife are the inevitable and persistent damage done. Recommend
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guest-lelsejm Jun 22nd, 14:31
It's also strange to think of the Netherlands as a monolingual country. If you live here, you know it's effectively bilingual with English, even tri-lingual if you take into account Fries - the language spoken in the North of the country. Recommend
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APenNameAndThatA in reply to guest-lelsejm Jun 23rd, 04:09
Which brings up the problem of CONFIRMATION BIAS. Without thinking about it, one will make Brazil multi-lingual, when it is basically mono-lingual. Without thinking about it, one will make Finland mono-lingual and not multi-lingual. Recommend
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MauroMello Jun 22nd, 14:28
Both, the original paper and this article are strong candidates for the IgNobel. I can't think of a better example of confounding causation with correlation. "The results held only slightly less strongly when excluding African countries"- how about excluding the European countries too, and checking the resulting correlations? I also doubt the quality of the analysis. How come Brazil - one of the most linguistically homogeneous countries in world - appears with a "loglanguage" of 4? Closer to China than to Japan. If you walk the streets of any city in Brazil, until you find someone that do not speak Portuguese, you can be sure to find a foreigner. Brazil is as monolingual a country as you can get. How about the old chines saying: "the finger points to the moon; the wise looks to the moon, the fool looks to the finger"? "In the case of immigration, linguistic assimilation is important". The author chose to look at the language variable/axis, instead of the social cohesion factor? Seriously? There are so many wrong thinking in this article, it can't even be covered in a single comment. Recommend
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YgorC.S. in reply to MauroMello Jun 22nd, 21:26
I noticed that obvious mistake. They probably made a very basic research and found out that Brazil has 170 indigenous languages and other dozens of immigrant languages, but they forgot to go a little deeper in the analysis, as they would of course figure out that almost all those languages have a few hundreds or thousands of speakers, and most estimates give 98% or 99% of native Portuguese speakers in Brazil, certainly one of the highest levels of linguistic homogeneity in the world. Recommend
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guest-ooeoloi Jun 22nd, 14:09
Highly problematic. And somewhat pointless. So what? If people can somehow easily communicate then social capital increases? Where is the surprise or policy conclusion. Isn't born-out by Holland or Denmark since as highly integrated globally trading nations they are effectively bilingual with English as is India. Where does say Albania or Laos fit in? A load of nonesense with no coherent motive or conclusion Recommend
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S.Kruse Jun 22nd, 13:45
There remains a problem of cause and effect: High SC is the likely result of a long period of economic growth and industrialization, pulling the rural population to the more dynamic center - or centers - and extinguishing their languages and dialects in the process. Thus, the economic dynamics that led to the high SC may have killed the linguistic diversity, not the other way around. Recommend
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Sherbrooke Jun 22nd, 13:36
What a pile of...
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The first plot is very clearly a case of a mixture distribution, with two groups of countries at per capita GDP, say, greater than 25k, and smaller than 25k, would have a different amount of social capital flatlined with no link between the number of languages and social capital. This is what happens if you add some categorical variables to one corner of the plot without running any reasonable ANOVA. BTW, I have never ever seen an article like this one which would run like a student's paper on statistical analysis. I.e. that would sound like "we tried one of the four variables, we use this measures, we tried this and this and we arrived at this model which, we believe, explains the situation the best". Statistically speaking, this article is stuck somewhere between 2nd and 3rd year of college for non-stats majors. Can you at least consult someone before you post this? Recommend
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MauroMello in reply to Sherbrooke Jun 22nd, 14:26
Precisely! Both, the original paper and this article are strong candidates for the IgNobel. I can't think of a better example of confounding causation with correlation. I also doubt the quality of the analysis. How come Brazil - one of the most linguistically homogeneous countries in world - appears with a "loglanguage" of 4? Closer to China than to Japan. If you walk the streets of any city in Brazil, until you find someone that do not speak Portuguese, you can be sure to find a foreigner. Brazil is as monolingual a country as you can get. How about the old chines saying: "the finger points to the moon; the wise looks to the moon, the fool looks to the finger"? "In the case of immigration, linguistic assimilation is important". The author chose to look at the language variable/axis, instead of the social cohesion factor? Seriously? There are so many wrong thinking in this article, it can't even be covered in a single comment. Recommend
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ashbird Jun 22nd, 05:19
I am not sure I understand the full meaning of the term "social capital". What I do know is learning the language of the host country is necessary for basic survival, apart from its being done in deference to the culture of the host country. Why would one want to immigrate if the desire is to live in the same capsule transferred from one to the next? Recommend
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dtmurphy Jun 21st, 07:57
Re: "The host countries must create the kind of inclusive society that says that anyone putting the effort in will be welcome." There's the carrot, but where is the stick? The host countries must create the kind of cohesive society that says that anyone not putting the effort in will be expelled without apology. The burden of change is on the immigrant. That's how it should be. Recommend
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bozzojn in reply to dtmurphy Jun 22nd, 13:29
I'm not too sure about that my friend. In the words of Will Kymlicka: "the language and culture people are raised in should be seen as part of their unchosen circumstances, rather than a voluntary taste. Having to abandon one's language and culture for another, while obviously not impossible, is often a very difficult and costly process, and it is unreasonable to expect minorities to bear this cost when members of the majority face no comparable sacrifice."
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dtmurphy in reply to bozzojn Jun 22nd, 13:34
Cry me a river. Life is unfair. When you emigrate and receive citizenship in another country, you will and must change. If I moved to China because my country was melting down and China was generous enough to give me citizenship, you can be sure I'd try to fit in. Of course no-one abandons his culture entirely (and if there are positive attributes that's all for the better), but it is the duty of parents to make sure their kids assimilate into the country of residence and citizenship. Generations of Americans have done exactly that. I'm a product of that and not upset about it whatsoever. Recommend
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