Hard News: Diverse Auckland: are we there yet?
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jh,
Michael King on Pakeha identity and culture :
http://www.sof.org.nz/origins.htm
What a shame he died in a car crash -brake failure. -
Steve Barnes, in reply to
What a shame he died in a car crash -brake failure.
The grossest expression of this view came in a letter I received from a Hamilton reader who told me that I was known in the United States as a "nigger lover", and that I had betrayed my own culture and people.
Hamiltonian brake failure?
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jh, in reply to
Hamiltonian brake failure?
Pakeha culture shares some ingredients with its largely European cultures of origin: such as the English language, the Westminster Parliamentary system, the traditions and the conventions of the Open Society, in which every person is entitled to seek truth through a process of unfettered investigation and open disputation.
I'm not sure King had much time for post modernists?
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jh,
The flaw with diversity/multiculturalism (as I see it) is that you assume society will synthesize a common set of values that will override the interests of ethnic/cultural entities.
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Sacha, in reply to
and you assume common values aren't already there
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Steve Barnes, in reply to
I’m not sure King had much time for post modernists?
Not so much Pomo, more Classical Mechanics, in Hamilton, well, Maramarua, on the way to Hamilton.
HamiltonianA simple interpretation of the Hamilton mechanics comes from its application on a one-dimensional system consisting of one particle of mass m under no external forces applied. The Hamiltonian represents the total energy of the system, which is the sum of kinetic and potential energy,
Sometimes my plays on words confuse even me.
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jh, in reply to
and you assume common values aren’t already there
I think one problem is that a persons sense of identity is too important.
I have been watching documentaries. One posed the question: "but the proportions of migrants are small (10%, 14% 11%)" and wondered why that should be a problem. I think it is the perceived tipping point.This one uses the Shetlands: "everything else can change but I will always be a Shetlander". The Muslim doctor felt accepted (more so than in Northern Island), but what if immigration increased? What if he wasn't a doctor? The Shetlanders are very secure. I'm not sure whether the presenter reaches that conclusion or not?
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jh,
I think this one makes the point that while for some multiculturalism is a lot of nice people from different cultures all enjoying each other, for others they are just out there in competition. These are the people who see life from the other side.
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No, I don’t think the DoS is in the habit of publishing deliberate misinformation. But the numbers you cited are very strongly influenced by historical immigration laws and business conditions that no longer apply. They can’t be used to generalise about current migration rates and they’ll look quite different as the earlier years drop out of the 20-year period.
Seems like one of you is talking about net migration, and one about migration. They're pretty different figures.
And I don't think that evolutionary psychologists have any place in this debate. If evolutionary psychologists proved that there were evolutionary bases for rape and murder, would we just accept those? Be nice if we could step above Darwinism a little.
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Net immigration to Britain, just 48,000 in 1997, rose to 148,000 in 1998, and advanced even more sharply thereafter.
"net immigration" doesn't feel like a logical phrase to me, though I note it's used a lot on the internet. How can there be a net value to something going one way?
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jh,
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/may/24/tibet.china
I see Tibet is on it's way. Waikato Uni will love it. -
M Steinberg, in reply to
@ alobar,
The benefits of a mono-cultural are seen in Scandanavia where you have high levels of interpersonal trust and cohesion.
The research by Harvard's Robert Putman shows that the downside of diversity is that it reduces social capital. You get less community engagement, less trust.
"Putnam's findings reject both theories. In more diverse communities, he says, there were neither great bonds formed across group lines nor heightened ethnic tensions, but a general civic malaise. And in perhaps the most surprising result of all, levels of trust were not only lower between groups in more diverse settings, but even among members of the same group…
"It's an important addition to a growing body of evidence on the challenges created by diversity," says Harvard economist Edward Glaeser.In a recent study, Glaeser and colleague Alberto Alesina demonstrated that roughly half the difference in social welfare spending between the US and Europe -- Europe spends far more -- can be attributed to the greater ethnic diversity of the US population. Glaeser says lower national social welfare spending in the US is a "macro" version of the decreased civic engagement Putnam found in more diverse communities within the country.
Economists Matthew Kahn of UCLA and Dora Costa of MIT reviewed 15 recent studies in a 2003 paper, all of which linked diversity with lower levels of social capital. Greater ethnic diversity was linked, for example, to lower school funding, census response rates, and trust in others. Kahn and Costa's own research documented higher desertion rates in the Civil War among Union Army soldiers serving in companies whose soldiers varied more by age, occupation, and birthplace.
Birds of different feathers may sometimes flock together, but they are also less likely to look out for one another. "Everyone is a little self-conscious that this is not politically correct stuff," says Kahn."
http://boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/?page=full
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BenWilson, in reply to
Were you able to understand how diversity is quantified in the study? Talking of links between greater diversity and x suggest that the diversity was actually quantified. But I'm yet to get any answers to this question on this thread.
It's a pretty important question, especially considering the possibility that the quantification of diversity involves the total population size. Because those studies are comparing the USA with Europe, and I can't tell if they mean "all of Europe" or "Individual countries in Europe". If the former, then the idea that there is greater social cohesion is very hard for me to accept. Europe has in living memory had multiple massive wars sweeping across it killing millions. If you could find a more stark example of the breakdown of social cohesion, have at it. Within Europe, in the last 20 years, there has been actual genocide. Right now, there's a chance that the Union might even fall apart completely due to the collapse of a number of its nations economies.
If it's talking about individual countries, then comparing with a giant country like the USA is rather spurious. The USA maybe has higher diversity because it is much bigger, and that's pretty much the whole story. So they could have just substituted "bigger" for "more diverse" and had all the same findings. This is why I keep hammering: How is diversity quantified? How can you have a meaningful discussion without this extremely basic point being agreed on in any way?
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Sacha, in reply to
the difference in social welfare spending between the US and Europe
is because the US and its States have long had weak commitment to social welfare, whereas many nations in Europe have strong commitments. Nothing to do with population diversity at all. #pfft
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alobar, in reply to
The benefits of a mono-cultural are seen in Scandanavia where you have high levels of interpersonal trust and cohesion.
From wikipedia :
"As of 2010 however, 1.33 million people or 14.3% of the inhabitants in Sweden were foreign-born. Of these, 859,000 (64.6%) were born outside the European Union and 477,000 (35.4%) were born in another EU member state.[2] Sweden has been transformed from a nation of net emigration ending after World War I to a nation of net immigration from World War II onwards. In 2009, immigration reached its highest level since records began with 102,280 people migrating to Sweden while the total population grew by 84,335.[1]
World War IIImmigration increased markedly with World War II. Historically, the most numerous of foreign born nationalities are ethnic Germans from Germany and other Scandinavians from Denmark and Norway.[citation needed] In short order, 70,000 war children were evacuated from Finland, of which 15,000 remained in Sweden. Also, many of Denmark's nearly 7,000 Jews who were evacuated to Sweden decided to remain there.[citation needed]
A sizable community from the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) arrived during the Second World War.[5]
1945 to 1967
During the 1950s and 1960s, the recruitment of immigrant labor was an important factor of immigration. The Nordic countries signed a trade agreement in 1952, establishing a common labour market and free movement across borders. This migration within the Nordic countries, especially from Finland to Scandinavia, was essential to create the tax-base required for the expansion of the strong public sector now characteristic of Scandinavia. This continued until 1967, when the labour market became saturated, and Sweden introduced new immigration controls.
On a smaller scale, Sweden took in political refugees from Hungary and the former Czechoslovakia after their countries were invaded by the Soviet Union in 1956 and 1968 respectively. Some tens of thousands of American draft dodgers from the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s also found refuge in Sweden.
Contemporary immigrationSince the early 1970s, immigration to Sweden has been mostly due to refugee migration and family reunification from countries in the Middle East and Latin America.[6]"
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BenWilson, in reply to
Yeah, but they're all "Pakeha", so no diversity there :-). Which is just to show that diversity is in serious need of definition. It depends on what you count as a different category of individual, before you even start putting them into a table of counts to find proportions, total number of categories and then doing your sums to decide what the level of diversity is. Are those "American draft dodgers" one race? Or should they be counted as one culture, where in America each one might fit into a different culture? Are "ethnic Germans" from the North coast even really that different from the Swedes on the southern coast, given a maritime connection over hundreds of years? Are ethnic Germans the same as each other, even, considering the number of different German tribes/kingdoms that made up modern Germany? Do Turkish "gastarbeiter" Germans count the same?
It might seem like a hair splitting question, but people are throwing numbers at this question like they mean something. So far, most of the numbers tell me more about the quirky rulers than the things they're measuring.
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alobar, in reply to
Yeah the statistics don't really mean a lot to me either , and even if the claim that Scandinavia is still largely monocultural and has high levels of trust is correct then that's possibly a feature of that particular culture rather than of monoculturalism in general .
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BenWilson, in reply to
Indeed, or one could even argue that the causation works the other way, that high levels of trust cause monoculturalism. Or even that they are simply correlated without any causation. But to even get to discussing the correlations, we need numbers, and to get numbers we need an agreed framework for the numbers, what they actually mean, how they're being counted.
From what I can tell, diversity is quite a difficult number, because it's a measure of two entirely different things at the same time. The first is the total number of categories of the thing you're looking at (say, culture, or race, or species), and the second is how evenly the population is spread across them.
So there two big difficulties when arguing about them. Firstly, defining the categories. How far should one subdivide? Secondly, larger populations probably contain more total categories, so they'll be more diverse on average, if other factors are equal, so how meaningful is it to compare differing population sizes?
All that said, I still find it plausible that less diverse places are more socially coherent. This doesn't necessarily make it better to be that way. I'd expect a stronger, but more rigid society. So, good for some things, some purposes, no good for others.
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alobar, in reply to
I’d expect a stronger, but more rigid society. So, good for some things, some purposes, no good for others.
Like good support for the average Joe , but less for those who break the mould.
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*Yeah the statistics don't really mean a lot to me either *
@ alobar,
1. You mean the Putman research I noted above?
2. In terms of Sweden, they certainly have had significant immigration in the past 30 or so years. And this has had quite mixed results, depending on where the migrants come from in terms of cultural compatibility. For example, newcomers to Sweden have a 520% higher incarceration rate than native Swedes.
http://super-economy.blogspot.co.nz/2010/04/immigrant-crime-in-sweden.html
For a particular case study in Sweden, look at the statistics in Malmo. http://super-economy.blogspot.co.nz/2013/05/malmo-case-study-in-multiculturalism.html
There has also been a rise in violent anti-semitism in Sweden (which is also feature in France and the Netherlands). See Daniel Radomski's recent article in Haaretz.
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alobar, in reply to
Malmo looks like an extreme case , a city that is 41% 1st or 2nd gen immigrants , mostly unskilled.
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Martin Lindberg, in reply to
For example, newcomers to Sweden have a 520% higher incarceration rate than native Swedes.
If you are going to quote from that article you could at least read all of it.
Yes, it says that:
Foreigners are thus 6.2 times as likely to be incarcerated than Swedes, or 520% higher incarceration rate.
The section before explains that foreigners are not synonymous with immigrants.
Sweden refuses to report the incarceration rate of immigrants. They do however report the incarceration rate of foreign citizens (people who don't have Swedish passports, not dual citizens). Immigrants who have gotten Swedish citizenship (56% of the foreign born 2008) will be counted as Swedes.
But I have a feeling you know all this already.
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Martin Lindberg, in reply to
Malmö looks like an extreme case , a city that is 41% 1st or 2nd gen immigrants , mostly unskilled.
Hey! We got Zlatan Ibrahimović from there...
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Russell Brown, in reply to
For a particular case study in Sweden, look at the statistics in Malmo.
Could we perhaps countenance the possibility that Sweden really has done this wrong? Concentrating poor, mostly Muslim, immigrants to the extent that they comprise 40% of Malmo’s population (versus 3.5% of the national population) hasn’t worked out and that hardly seems a surprise.
And immigrants are over-represented in crime statistics? Well, yeah. The same is true for “culturally compatible” New Zealanders in Australia too. But it’s also very true for Maori in their own country. Do you not think this has more to do with poverty and racism than being the fault of immigration per se?
There has also been a rise in violent anti-semitism in Sweden (which is also feature in France and the Netherlands). See Daniel Radomski’s recent article in Haaretz.
There’s a significant problem in Malmo, clearly. But there’s nearly as a big a problem amongst ethnic Swedes – who are also responsible for the persecution of Muslims.
And even Radomski, the chair of the Zionist Federation of Sweden, had this to say:
However the problem is not Malmö or even the predictable hate against both Israel and Jews that is being displayed and acted upon by certain elements of its population. It is the eagerness, with a small number of outstanding exceptions, of the mainstream media, politicians and opinion makers to ignore and hide current anti-Semitism under the cover of disproportionate and unjustified criticism of Israel. These attitudes should not be tolerated in modern Swedish society and until they are recognized and openly discussed, the tide of anti-Semitism against Swedish Jews will continue to rise.
Criticism of Israel isn’t anti-Semitism and whether it’s disproportionate may well be in the eye of the beholder.
But this is all boilerplate right-wing-blog stuff (like the Swedish Muslim child-rape lie) and I’m struggling to see its relevance to an Auckland where, as the original post indicates, people are getting on with living together to an extent that puts lie to the whole, creepy multiculturalism-is-the-enemy strain of thought.
Basically, if you have to invoke Sweden, you’ve lost the argument.
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alobar, in reply to
mostly unskilled.
Hey! We got Zlatan Ibrahimović from there…
well I said mostly ;)
And @ M Steinberg , what Russell said
(if you have to invoke Sweden, you’ve lost the argument.)
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