Some people say multiculturalism is great. Others say it's awful. Almost everyone agrees that immigrants should integrate or even assimilate to some degree, but they mean different things by that.
That's not really helpful when we debate these issues. One person might say "I think multiculturalism is a bad thing" and mean that they are worried about people who don't share a commitment to liberal democracy exerting political power. But someone else might interpret this to mean that they're offended by there being a mosque in the city, or by people speaking a foreign language at the supermarket.
So I wonder: are there different kinds of multiculturalism? Like, if you have people from many different cultural backgrounds and religions all committed to a liberal democratic political system, voting for various parties without explicit reference to their cultural background, is that a kind of multiculturalism?
The poll has a few options for what an immigrant should be doing before you consider them sufficiently "integrated" or "assimilated" (I realise that the two can mean different things, but for the purposes of this thread and the poll, it's probably easier to just take them both to mean "a part of 'us' to such a degree that their presence doesn't arouse particular feelings or resentments in me"). The poll is also biased towards integration in a Western country of the sort most of us are from, in which you have a liberal democracy with mostly socially liberal values.
To me, integration would be reached with just two of the above options: "sharing the same commitment to liberal, democratic political values as the general population" and "they have to act in accordance with the same standards regarding treatment of sex, gender, sexual preferences etc as the general population, including at home". To me, that would be enough to take part in society in a way that doesn't infringe on the way the society works in an unreasonable way. Diversity of any other sort is not necessarily a bad thing, and can be dealt with using the same general principles of how to treat other people as we already apply when dealing with the native-born.
So as a result, to me multiculturalism doesn't mean tolerating people who beat their wives or agitate for a theocracy. But it does mean tolerating that there's a Buddhist temple in town and that there are people speaking five different language when I catch public transport. For a long time I thought this was obvious, but it happens every so often that people have completely different ideas of what the word means and then talk past each other.
