Multiculturalism: "Utter Failure" In Germany, How about here?

[KinjaKahn]

17 October 2010 Last updated at 03:51 ET
Merkel says German multicultural society has failed

The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel: "lmmigrants should learn to speak German"

Attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany have "utterly failed", Chancellor Angela Merkel says.
She said the so-called "multikulti" concept - where people would "live side-by-side" happily - did not work, and immigrants needed to do more to integrate - including learning German.
The comments come amid rising anti-immigration feeling in Germany.

A recent survey suggested more than 30% of people believed the country was "overrun by foreigners".
The study - by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation think-tank - also showed that roughly the same number thought that some 16 million of Germany's immigrants or people with foreign origins had come to the country for its social benefits.
Foreign workers Mrs Merkel told a gathering of younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party on Saturday that at "the beginning of the 60s our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country."
She added: "We kidded ourselves a while, we said: 'They won't stay, sometime they will be gone', but this isn't reality."

"And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other... has failed, utterly failed."
In her speech in Potsdam, however, the chancellor made clear that immigrants were welcome in Germany.
She specifically referred to recent comments by German President Christian Wulff who said that Islam was "part of Germany", like Christianity and Judaism.
Mrs Merkel said: "We should not be a country either which gives the impression to the outside world that those who don't speak German immediately or who were not raised speaking German are not welcome here."
Mounting debate There has been intense debate about multiculturalism in Germany in recent months.
Correspondents say Mrs Merkel faces pressure from within her CDU and its allies to take a tougher stance and require immigrants to do more to adapt to German society.
Earlier this week, Horst Seehofer, the leader of the CDU's Bavarian sister party, the CSU, said it was "obvious that immigrants from different cultures like Turkey and Arab countries, all in all, find it harder" to integrate.

"'Multikulti' is dead," Mr Seehofer said.
Earlier this month the chancellor held talks with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in which the two leaders pledged to do more to improve the often poor integration record of Germany's estimated 2.5 million-strong Turkish community.
The debate first heated up in August when Thilo Sarrazin, a senior official at Germany's central bank, said that "no immigrant group other than Muslims is so strongly connected with claims on the welfare state and crime". Mr Sarrazin has since resigned.
Such recent strong anti-immigration feelings from mainstream politicians come amid an anger in Germany about high unemployment, even if the economy is growing faster than those of its rivals, our correspondent says.
He adds that there also seems to be a new strident tone in the country, perhaps leading to less reticence about no-go-areas of the past.
Link (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11559451)

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So is multiculturalism, Failed, failing or thriving in the United States?

[tichabou]

I don't know what multiculturalism is.

We seem to have pretty much every culture here in america (and have had for a good while), and america is a pretty awesome place to live, so seems like it's working okay.

[Jesse Helms' Ghost]

Multiculturalism is having an Indian driver taxi you to the airport, going to the 7-11 and having a Cambodian sell you a sixer, having your wife get her nails done at the Vietnamese-owned beauty parlor, having the English Au Pair watch your child while the French maid dusts your furniture, going to the Mexican restaurant for lunch and the Thai place for dinner, then having to call the black plumber to fix your Chinese-made latrine later.

That….is multiculturalism.

This nonsense about getting a Brazilian from a Chilean while eating tomatoes sliced by a Guatemalan is bunk. That is not multiculturalism.


In Germany, i can see how multiculturalism failed. Very few abide by the German beer purity laws.

http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/german-beer.jpg

[domenick2x]

I don't know what multiculturalism is.

We seem to have pretty much every culture here in america (and have had for a good while), and america is a pretty awesome place to live, so seems like it's working okay.
Check out some of the history of immigration to America. We had some of the same issues with respect to the Irish, the Italians, etc.

Language proficiency is key to integration, though. Without that, you are severely limited in how well you can integrate. However, 2nd and 3rd generations are better integrated.

[Vegas]

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."

Multiculturalism is not just a recognition that different groups have different cultures. We all knew that, long before multiculturalism became a cult that has spawned mindless rhapsodies about "diversity," without a speck of evidence to substantiate its supposed benefits.

In Germany, as in other countries in Europe, welcoming millions of foreign workers who insist on remaining foreign has created problems so obvious that only the intelligentsia could fail to see them. It takes a high IQ to evade the obvious.

"We kidded ourselves for a while," Chancellor Merkel said, but now it was clear that the attempt to build a society where people of very different languages and cultures could "live side-by-side" and "enjoy each other" has "failed, utterly failed."

This is not a lesson for Germany alone. In countries around the world, and over the centuries, peoples with jarring differences in language, cultures and values have been a major problem and, too often, sources of major disasters for the societies in which they co-exist.

Even the tragedies and atrocities associated with racial differences in racist countries have been exceeded by the tragedies and atrocities among people with clashing cultures who are physically indistinguishable from one another, as in the Balkans or Rwanda.

Among the ways that people with different cultures have managed to minimize frictions have been (1) mutual cultural accommodations, even while not amalgamating completely, and (2) living separately in their own enclaves. Both of these approaches are anathema to the multicultural cultists.

Expecting any group to adapt their lifestyles to the cultural values of the larger society around them is "cultural imperialism" according to the multicultural cult. And living in separate neighborhoods is considered to be so terrible that there are government-financed programs to take people from high-crime slums and put them in subsidized housing in middle-class neighborhoods.

Multiculturalists condemn people's objections to transplanting hoodlums, criminals and dysfunctional families into the midst of people who may have sacrificed for years to be able to escape from living among hoodlums, criminals and dysfunctional families.

The actual direct experience of the people who complain about the consequences of these social experiments is often dismissed as mere biased "perceptions" or "stereotypes," if not outright "racism." But some of the strongest complaints have come from middle-class blacks who have fled ghetto life, only to have the government transplant ghetto life back into their midst.

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 the 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.

None of this was peculiar to America. When immigrants from southern Italy to Australia moved into neighborhoods where people from northern Italy lived, the northern Italians moved out. Such scenarios could be found in countries around the world.

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

http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2010/10/19/the_multicultural_cult/page/full/

[Jesse Helms' Ghost]

Check out some of the history of immigration to America. We had some of the same issues with respect to the Irish, the Italians, etc.

Language proficiency is key to integration, though. Without that, you are severely limited in how well you can integrate. However, 2nd and 3rd generations are better integrated. Yup. Every new generation of immigrants has had it hard and taken crap.

The white races just got here before most others.