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文章有关澳洲移民，特别是穆斯林移民的影响。并对欧洲、美国和澳洲加以对比。 文章很长，也很有深度。感兴趣的可以慢慢读。 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/ ... 9niix-1226031793805 How I lost faith in multiculturalism Greg Sheridan From:The Australian April 02, 2011 12:00AM Increase Text Size Decrease Text Size Share Friday prayers outside Lakemba Mosque in southwest Sydney's Muslim heartland. Picture: Chris Hyde Source: The Australian IN 1993, my family and I moved into Belmore in southwest Sydney. It is the next suburb to Lakemba. When I first moved there I loved it. We bought a house just behind Belmore Sports Ground, in those days the home of my beloved Bulldogs rugby league team. Transport was great, 20 minutes to the city in the train, 20 minutes to the airport. On the other side of Belmore, away from Lakemba, there were lots of Chinese, plenty of Koreans, growing numbers of Indians, and on the Lakemba side lots of Lebanese and other Arabs. That was an attraction, too. I like Middle Eastern food. I like Middle Eastern people. The suburb still had the remnants of its once big Greek community and a commanding Greek Orthodox church. But in the nearly 15 years we lived there the suburb changed, and much for the worse. Three dynamics interacted in a noxious fashion: the growth of a macho, misogynist culture among young men that often found expression in extremely violent crime; a pervasive atmosphere of anti-social behaviour in the streets; and the simultaneous growth of Islamist extremism and jihadi culture. Start of sidebar. Skip to end of sidebar. Related Coverage We've got multiculturalism right Herald Sun, 5 days ago Lack of support fuels ethnic-based crime The Australian, 7 Mar 2011 Goers: Multiculturalism defines us Adelaide Now, 26 Feb 2011 Migration needs serious debate The Australian, 25 Feb 2011 We don't need to be told how to interact The Australian, 23 Feb 2011 End of sidebar. Return to start of sidebar. This is my story, our story and the story of a failed policy. THE three great settler immigrant societies of Australia, the US and Canada have not seen an anti-Muslim backlash on anything like that of Europe's. Australia, the US and Canada are more successful immigrant societies than those of Europe in the modern era, but the usual self-congratulatory explanation we offer for this is simply that our settlement practices are superior to that of Europe. In the three countries identity can be credal. Recite the nation's creed, believe the creed, and you are an insider. It's a powerful mechanism because it focuses on values, not ethnicity. You sign up to the US constitution and by golly you're an American. You take out Australian citizenship and you're Australian. Immigrants are more welcome and make a better contribution than is the case in Europe. There is some truth in all this, and in any event it's a mostly benign myth, but it doesn't really stand up to scrutiny as a serious intellectual explanation. Certainly the presence or absence of multiculturalism as a state policy seems to have no effect. Canada practices multiculturalism. Australia did for a while but then stopped and is now, apparently, half-heartedly starting again, according to a recent speech by Immigration Minister Chris Bowen. The US, on the other hand, does not practice multiculturalism, yet is the biggest and most successful immigrant society in history -- more than 310 million people live there from every corner of the globe. It has a black President, Asian state governors (including two Punjabis) and a vastly more ethnically diverse cabinet and corporate leadership than Australia. There is a big problem of illegal immigration in the US, but that is overwhelmingly from Latin America. The Hispanic desire to be part of America at a civic level is evident in the huge recruitment rates of Hispanics in the US military. If you're willing to die for your new country that is surely a convincing sign of commitment. Here in Australia Bowen, in his February 16 speech, titled "The genius of Australian multiculturalism", posited the comforting notion that it is the superiority of our own multiculturalism policies that have made so big a difference between us and the tensions of Europe. I'm afraid Bowen's speech had the opposite effect on me. It completed my transformation. Whereas once I wholeheartedly supported multiculturalism, I now think it's a failure and the word should be abandoned. Australian society and government were mostly doing this until Bowen's speech. As a policy, multiculturalism was introduced by immigration minister Al Grassby during the Whitlam government . It was formalised a bit more by Malcolm Fraser and then further refined by Bob Hawke and Paul Keating before being gently left to die of natural causes under the Howard government. In 1988, during the Hawke government, former ambassador to China Stephen FitzGerald wrote a landmark report on immigration and multiculturalism. He concluded that the policies behind Australian immigration were broadly sound but the program needed a much stronger emphasis on skilled migration and the economic contribution migrants could make to Australia. He also essentially said, though in different words, that the term multiculturalism was useless and confusing, but the policies pursued under its heading, such as teaching migrants English and welcoming their contribution and so on, were good policies. Hawke and Keating nonetheless stuck with the term. It was hotly contested and highly divisive. It had two big political dividends for Labor: it led to deep divisions within the Liberal Party; and it helped convince migrants that Labor was more naturally sympathetic to them. It's very unclear that the term made any positive contribution to the happy settlement of migrants. In the 1990s and beyond, Australia moved away from multiculturalism. A key moment came when then NSW premier Bob Carr abolished the NSW ethnic affairs commission. He felt the constant repetition of ethnic this and ethnic that was not productive and he didn't think migrants needed a special bureaucracy to watch over them. Community relations is a more inclusive term than ethnic. It includes everybody, not just migrants. Similarly the immigration department acquired the word citizenship in its title and lost the word multiculturalism. This was a natural and sensible evolution and one that reflected the maturing, the normalisation, of a welcoming diversity within Australia. Now Bowen proudly proclaims "I am not afraid to use the word multiculturalism" and has restored Multicultural Affairs to the title of his Immigration parliamentary secretary, though not to that of his department. Could it be that Bowen hopes once more to inflict division on his political opponents? Is Labor is playing politics with the rhetoric of settlement policies? For the word has no agreed meaning. Bowen can't be under the misapprehension that he is communicating something clear by the resurrection of this hotly contested, wildly elastic and downright ugly jargon word, multiculturalism. It seems instead to fulfil George Orwell's observation that "political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind". Multiculturalism has not been used much in Australia in the past decade. Its primary meaning now comes from Europe, and to a lesser extent American university debates. If it means something different in Australia there will need to be a massive effort to convince people of its special, non-standard meaning. What is the purpose of such an effort? But Bowen's speech alone has not turned me into an opponent of multiculturalism. While I remain a proponent of a big, non-discriminatory immigration program and celebrate and love Australian diversity, it is the real world that has changed my views. In particular it is four real-world experiences: watching the debate unfold about the illegal immigrants who come to Australia by boat; a month in Europe researching and writing about immigration issues; 30 years reporting on political Islam in Southeast Asia and the Middle East; and, above all, living for nearly 15 years next door to Lakemba in Sydney's southwest, the most Muslim suburb in Australia. In his speech Bowen sets up a neat dichotomy between a good Australian multiculturalism and a bad European multiculturalism. Bowen is right to point out that Australian official policy, whether at any given moment describing itself as multiculturalism or not, has always stressed English as the national language and the need for immigrants to commit to democracy and the rule of law. But at the declaratory level, European multiculturalism has also stressed the national language and a commitment to democracy. Bowen accuses Europe of not welcoming immigrants in the way Australia has. Certainly some European nations have not been generous in making citizenship easily available to immigrants in the way Australia has. Citizenship is the great integrating instrument of government policy in Australia, the US and in most immigrant societies. But Bowen's broad accusation is not true for most of Europe. Certainly in Britain migrants can become citizens. Similarly, it would be absurd to suggest, at the official level at least, that Britain has not had an officially welcoming attitude to immigrants. London, with New York, is one of the great, diverse metropolises of the world. And most important, while all of western Europe seems to be suffering a variety of the same immigration problem, European nations have had radically different settlement policies. Britain has practised multiculturalism, France has not. There are two obvious, logical flaws in the way Bowen treats immigration into Europe. The first is that he puts the entire burden for the success or failure of an immigrant community's experience down to the attitude of the host society and places absolutely no analytical weight at all on the performance and behaviour of the immigrants themselves. Second, the problems that Bowen is talking about are problems with Muslim immigrants, not with immigrants generally. Chinese and non-Muslim Indian immigrants have been immensely successful in Britain. Indeed, being Indian in Britain is extremely chic. These minorities for the most part have done OK in France, too. Certainly immigrants to Britain from the rest of Europe don't display anything like the alienation of a serious minority of Muslim immigrants. So this must, logically, lead to one extremely inconvenient, politically incorrect and desperately fraught question. Could it be that the main difference between Europe, with its seething immigration problems, and the US, Canada and Australia, with their success, is not actually a difference based on some footling interpretation of multiculturalism? There is one other variable that is consistent with the results. The US, Canada and Australia have far smaller Muslim migrant communities as a percentage of their total populations than do most of the troubled nations of Europe. Could this be the explanation? Several trends in Australian society give pause to wonder whether we, all unintentionally and all fast asleep, may be heading away from the US-Canada-Australia success story and towards a European future. That would be a very bad outcome for Australia. Discussing these issues is very difficult. It goes without saying that most Muslims in Australia are perfectly fine, law-abiding citizens. The difficulty with discussing Muslim immigration problems is that you don't want to make people feel uncomfortable because of their religion. Muslims are not only individuals, wholly different from each other, but national Islamic cultures are very different from each other. The Saudi culture is different from the Turkish culture, which is different from the Afghan culture. So generalisations are dangerous. Then there is the ever present risk of being labelled a racist. No matter how calmly the discussion is conducted, that is a big danger. But the only people who don't think there is a problem with Islam are those who live on some other planet. The reputation of Islam in the West is not poor because of prejudiced Western Islamophobia, still less because Western governments conduct some kind of anti-Islamic propaganda. Instead, it is the behaviour of people claiming the justification of Islam for their actions that affects the reputation of Islam. In January, the governor of the Punjab province in Pakistan, Salman Taseer, was murdered because he opposed the severity of the nation's blasphemy laws. One of his last acts was to visit a Christian woman sentenced to death for insulting the prophet. The governor's murderer won wide public support. ABC television recently showed a documentary on the killing of Ahmediya sect members in Indonesia, among the most liberal Muslim nations, because their Muslim murderers regarded them as a deviant sect. On YouTube you can watch scenes of a young Afghan woman being publicly flogged because she was seen in the company of a man who wasn't her husband or brother. In Saudi Arabia, women are not allowed to drive cars. In Iran, government thugs beat protesters to death to safeguard the rule of the mullahs. This list could go on and on. It may very well be that the overwhelming majority of the world's Muslims reject such actions. But it is fatuous to try to find a similar pattern of Christian, Buddhist or Jewish behaviour. You can find extremists in every religion and from every background, but there is no equivalence in the size and strength of the extremist tendency in other religions. |
