Thomas Sowell: The Cult of Multiculturalism
[Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.]
Somebody eventually had to say it — and German chancellor Angela Merkel deserves credit for being the one who had the courage to say it out loud. Multiculturalism has “utterly failed.”...
The absorption of millions of immigrants from Europe into American society may be cited as an example of the success of multiculturalism. But, in fact, they were absorbed in ways that were the direct opposite of what the multicultural cult is recommending today.
Before these immigrants were culturally assimilated to the norms of American society, they were by no means scattered at random among the population at large. On New York’s Lower East Side, Hungarian Jews lived clustered together in different neighborhoods from Romanian Jews or Polish Jews — and German Jews lived away from the Lower East Side.
When someone suggested relieving the overcrowding in Lower East Side schools by transferring some of the children to a school in an Irish neighborhood that had space, both the Irish and the Jews objected....
It was in later generations, after the children and grandchildren of the immigrants to America were speaking English and living lives more like the lives of other Americans, that they spread out to live and work where other Americans lived and worked. This wasn’t multiculturalism. It was common sense.
Read entire article at National Review
Somebody eventually had to say it — and German chancellor Angela Merkel deserves credit for being the one who had the courage to say it out loud. Multiculturalism has “utterly failed.”...
The absorption of millions of immigrants from Europe into American society may be cited as an example of the success of multiculturalism. But, in fact, they were absorbed in ways that were the direct opposite of what the multicultural cult is recommending today.
Before these immigrants were culturally assimilated to the norms of American society, they were by no means scattered at random among the population at large. On New York’s Lower East Side, Hungarian Jews lived clustered together in different neighborhoods from Romanian Jews or Polish Jews — and German Jews lived away from the Lower East Side.
When someone suggested relieving the overcrowding in Lower East Side schools by transferring some of the children to a school in an Irish neighborhood that had space, both the Irish and the Jews objected....
It was in later generations, after the children and grandchildren of the immigrants to America were speaking English and living lives more like the lives of other Americans, that they spread out to live and work where other Americans lived and worked. This wasn’t multiculturalism. It was common sense.