When I was a fresh immigrant child comments like these used to make me feel more uncomfortable than they do now. How I perceive these comments has changed over time.
What I want to address about this comment is the implicit identity associations involved. It's clear that you're drawing an identity distinction between "Canadian" and "Indian".
One of the things I've noticed about my own personal associations is that my own identity as an "Indian" kind of dissolved over the course of a decade or so after I immigrated as a child.
And when it evolved it didn't evolve in the direction of "Canadianness", for some generic definition thereof. My cultural identity broadened along horizons that had nothing to do with nationality.
When I think of "my tribe" now, it's on a values and interest basis. "My people" aren't Canadians or Indians, they're programmers and engineers and scientists and mathemeticians. Where I draw identity lines, it's no longer along national lines. My tribe's Gods are Turing and Church. Our saints are Torvalds and Carmack and Stroustrup and Van Rossum and Wall. We are friendly with the neighboring tribes that follow Euler and Goedel, as well as the yonder followers of Einstein and Newton and Feynman.
And I think that perspective dichotomy is reflective of an underlying deep shift in how people form identities, one that's being driven by the rise of instant, rich global communications through the internet.
So when I read comments like yours these days, I see yet another sign of the tension between that old structure and the new.
To bring this back to a Canadian context, Stephen Harper (former conservative PM) actually called this out very astutely a long time ago when talking about the Somewheres vs the Anywheres:
> Harper argues that today’s conservative populism deserves a respectful hearing because it harnesses the legitimate anxieties of the Somewheres, who haven’t been doing all that well in the globalized economy. As for the Anywheres, they don’t get it.
I'd only disagree about that last statement. I get it :) It's just that having been born in a very Somewhere place and having become an Anywhere, I really can't explain the depth of freedom you feel when you escape those identity bounds.
It's not that I don't understand the cultural perspective of the Somewheres. It's just that I see it as a prison.
It's playful language in observation, not prescriptive. The key distinction is that the caste system is impose on the individual, which when you think about it is actually more analogous to national or religious identity.
These new fragmented identities are self-selected.
"If" you have the ability to meet the requirements to be in the self-selected group, sure. If you were just living the life everyone around you did previously, and suddenly were replaced by a new 'self-selected' group, you just moved into a caste without choosing to move away from the previous way the society they grew up in, were taught how to live within by their parents and society.
Oh I understand the problem. But the real issue isn't some external replacement, which is what tends to get focused on.
The real problem is that it's happening from the inside out, and it's happening everywhere. The reality is that Canadians of one stripe or another will identify more with an American of that same stripe, or a European or Asian origin person of that same stripe, than they will with somebody else of a different stripe of their own nationality.
That national association has been fading for a long time. And ironically, it's been driven along by American brand culture, which has done its level best to introduce people to aligning themselves on brand identities because that's a potent source of revenue.
A few generations have come and gone now with people slowly being trained to de-emphasize national identity.
And the internet came along and gave everyone access to an infinite regenerating pool of communities that people can align and re-align with.
This is a phase change in society and it's about as unstoppable as continental drift.
> When I was a fresh immigrant child comments like these used to make me feel more uncomfortable than they do now. How I perceive these comments has changed over time.
I don't wish you to be uncomfortable, I'm happy to hear your comfort increases as you age. Still, maybe it's worth taking note that the kinds of people that believe in great replacement will never see you as anything other than Indian, same for your children.
You may feel less Indian and more something else, but others disagree.
Check out the first reply to your comment. Ignored everything you said about identity, just says "Gee, sounds like you brought the Caste system from India to Canada!"
Please keep a wary eye out. Reminds me of that Jubilee video that just came out with a bunch of fascists vs Mehdi Hasan - there's a couple non white conservatives there who watch supposed ideological allies say directly in front of them that they don't want non whites in the country. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S-WJN3L5eo
> You may feel less Indian and more something else, but others disagree.
Oh I'm absolutely aware of this. The collectives around you trying to force an identity on you is one of the core tensions everyone faces. That tension manifests everywhere. Go back to India and the entire country tries to reimpose my identity as a Hindu.
There's baggage that comes with the pigment for sure.
The thing I want to point out is that there is a deep schism in the process of occurring - within the local "native" population as it were. The simple fact is that if you go talk to an urban progressive Canadian and ask them to choose between identifying with me and one of their less progressive born-in-Canada fairer skinned fellow citizens.. most will pick me. Because I can relate to them, and I talk like them, and I share their culture.
The problem with this reformulation of identity is that it's a threat to other identities that depend on numbers - like national identity. The people strongly tied to the old identity systems that depend on numbers for strength, see their framework eroding in significance, but they don't quite understand why. This leads to the scapegoating of various specific identities - whether that be immigrant or gender identity or sexual identity - which we can see happening now.
My identity as a cultural interloper is just one part of this. The explosion of social interest in gender identity and sexual identity, and the nationalist reaction against it, is part of the same trend. The fact that all of this and the reaction to all of this is happening globally - across countries, across continents.
We are in the middle of one of the biggest, most consequential upheavals in social order since the enlightenment. It's an incredible thing to witness (and yes, deeply unsettling at a personal level when you think of the consequences of this in terms of real harm to real people).
“In The Culture Transplant, Garett Jones documents the cultural foundations of cross-country income differences, showing that immigrants import cultural attitudes from their homelands—toward saving, toward trust, and toward the role of government—that persist for decades, and likely for centuries, in their new national homes. Full assimilation in a generation or two, Jones reports, is a myth. And the cultural traits migrants bring to their new homes have enduring effects upon a nation's economic potential.”
> Toronto, where immigrants from the subcontinent grow up in enclaves surrounded by other immigrants.
Citation please, because this is sweeping. Two questions to consider:
1. Are these enclaves representative of the subcontinent, or of a few over-represented communities that is actually a small fraction of the Indian subcontinental population?
2. Of all the people from the Indian subcontinent here, how many live in enclaves versus otherwise?
True enough but probably not relevant to anything. Every society is already a patchwork of families with different beliefs that date back centuries. So noting that immigrants will form a complicated tapestry of new beliefs doesn't really bring much to the conversation - there wasn't subgroup of the host nation were they meant to assimilate with in an alternative scenario. The hypothetical culture that countries tell themselves they have appears to be mostly mythical.
So it turns out immigrants are just people too and behave in the only way they possibly can. Although maybe don't just let anyone in, dump them in the middle of nowhere and hope they turn out well. That'll probably end poorly. Setting people up with economic opportunities make for happy societies.
>> dump them in the middle of nowhere and hope they turn out well
A big part of the problem seems to be the opposite: Canada has dense cultural centers of specific immigrants, and not suprisingly new people from the same origins want to land there too. The challenge is this doesn't necessarily match with where people are needed the most.
> True enough but probably not relevant to anything. Every society is already a patchwork of families with different beliefs that date back centuries.
In most existing societies, that patchwork follows normal distributions centered around recognizable points. This is obvious even in the U.S. Sure, you’ll meet chatty people in rural Oregon and curt people in rural Georgia. But if you’re culturally calibrated to make small talk like in Georgia then you’ll piss off most cashiers in Oregon.
Once you acknowledge that these differences exist, you also have to acknowledge that these differences aren’t merely superficial. It’s not just food and dress, but also attitudes about honor, conflict resolution, trust, saving, debt, justice, and government. Look at Minnesota (historically) as compared to Scandinavia (from where a lot of Minnesotans immigrated). You can easily see the through lines connecting the governance of those places. You can easily see the differences in governance between Iowa and Alabama.
If you bring in a bunch of immigrants it'll still have recognised centres to the distributions. That is literally how the US population was built. That is the thing about distributions, they form. It isn't possible to live in a place with other people and not start forming cultural links.
There isn't a question here that different people have different cultures and migration changes culture. Indeed, if we assume that migrants migrate to places with cultures that promote success then change the culture that'd suggest that migrants cause mean-reversion for the worse. But on the other hand that mean reversion happens anyway, cultures change anyway and migrants tend to be a bit smarter and more motivated than the locals so it is hard to really be certain.
It is still a bit of a non-issue that immigrants don't assimilate into something that doesn't really exist in an environment that was changing anyway. I wish more people from my own culture would assimilate into it a bit better and maybe keep to some of the good ideas a little more diligently. Or even just agree on what they were.
> If you bring in a bunch of immigrants it'll still have recognised centres to the distributions. That is literally how the US population was built.
Yes, but the center of the distributions along various axes will shift. To give an example: I grew up in Northern VA, which in the 1990s was quite WASPy. One aspect of that culture was austerity: it was hard to tell the people worth tens of millions apart from upper middle class doctors and lawyers. Now, the influx of immigrants from Asia and the Middle East has totally destroyed that norm. Relatively discrete brick mansions are being turn down and replaced with enormous and ostentatious displays of wealth.
> Indeed, if we assume that migrants migrate to places with cultures that promote success then change the culture that'd suggest that migrants cause mean-reversion for the worse.
That’s the concern. And it’s not just “success.” But orderliness, egalitarianism, democracy, etc. Most societies are much less successful on all those fronts than America. The only direction we can really go is down.
>It is still a bit of a non-issue that immigrants don't assimilate into something that doesn't really exist in an environment that was changing anyway.
The "something that doesn't really exist" is what allows immigrants to come in the first place, an accepting and tolerant culture. It's what allows women to walk home at 2 AM and what made people fight for gay marriage.
Does this nihilistic view of culture cut both ways by the way? Was Nazi Germany just fine culturally speaking?
You're assuming perfect assimilation happens. Otherwise you simply have a colony. If the colony outstrips the natives, they change the culture and eventually the governance of a place by right of conquest. Then they can change names and there's no denying it.
States encompass territory, but nations are defined by their people and culture.
They don’t even need to achieve a majority. Look at New York City or urban New Jersey. You think those places are the same as they would have been had they remained British and Dutch?
What I want to address about this comment is the implicit identity associations involved. It's clear that you're drawing an identity distinction between "Canadian" and "Indian".
One of the things I've noticed about my own personal associations is that my own identity as an "Indian" kind of dissolved over the course of a decade or so after I immigrated as a child.
And when it evolved it didn't evolve in the direction of "Canadianness", for some generic definition thereof. My cultural identity broadened along horizons that had nothing to do with nationality.
When I think of "my tribe" now, it's on a values and interest basis. "My people" aren't Canadians or Indians, they're programmers and engineers and scientists and mathemeticians. Where I draw identity lines, it's no longer along national lines. My tribe's Gods are Turing and Church. Our saints are Torvalds and Carmack and Stroustrup and Van Rossum and Wall. We are friendly with the neighboring tribes that follow Euler and Goedel, as well as the yonder followers of Einstein and Newton and Feynman.
And I think that perspective dichotomy is reflective of an underlying deep shift in how people form identities, one that's being driven by the rise of instant, rich global communications through the internet.
So when I read comments like yours these days, I see yet another sign of the tension between that old structure and the new.
To bring this back to a Canadian context, Stephen Harper (former conservative PM) actually called this out very astutely a long time ago when talking about the Somewheres vs the Anywheres:
https://macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/stephen-harper-has-some-...
> Harper argues that today’s conservative populism deserves a respectful hearing because it harnesses the legitimate anxieties of the Somewheres, who haven’t been doing all that well in the globalized economy. As for the Anywheres, they don’t get it.
I'd only disagree about that last statement. I get it :) It's just that having been born in a very Somewhere place and having become an Anywhere, I really can't explain the depth of freedom you feel when you escape those identity bounds.
It's not that I don't understand the cultural perspective of the Somewheres. It's just that I see it as a prison.