Friday, April 18, 2008

Poll: Too Much Accommodation To Minorities

There’s a new poll out that says most Canadians feel their country makes too many accommodations to visible minorities. More than 60 percent of respondents to a survey done for CTV and the Globe and Mail say Canada does too much. There was an interesting rural-urban split in the numbers. Folks who live in big cities apparently don’t feel as strongly about this - but even there, a majority of 55% felt there was too much accommodation. In smaller towns, the number was at 71 percent.
Sure there will be plenty of activists out there crying "racism" even louder than the legendary boy cried "wolf". Yet, as the same survey shows, it's not the race that matters nowadays. In fact only 9% of the survey respondents thought encouraging the immigration of visible minorities was a “negative” for the country. Far larger share of respondents (45%) said the problem was in a lack of integration. People aren't comfortable with the way newcomers tend to hold onto their customs and traditions for too long rather than embracing the country that has accepted them.

No, nobody says that newcomers should forget their mother tongue, change their names to John or Jane Doe and start avoiding people from their home country. But when we get tens of thousands of immigrants voluntarily isolating themselves in their neighborhoods and trying to recreate the very same living conditions they supposedly wanted to avoid by leaving their home country - then anyone witnessing this might ask why did they leave their home countries in the first place. And that's a perfectly valid question, which has absolutely nothing to do with racism.

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