Multiculturalism and immigrant groups

DEFINITION: View that no single ethnic group should impose its culture onto the rest of the population of a diverse country but instead will benefit from greater familiarity with and respect for contributions of all cultural groups.

SIGNIFICANCE: Since the mid-1960s, multiculturalists have worked to counter tendencies of immigrant groups and minorities being denigrated. They have succeeded in gaining adoption of on-the-job cultural sensitivity programs and educational curricula presenting positive images of nonmainstream groups. Government agencies have implemented multicultural reforms in response to pressure from minorities to decrease discrimination and prejudice, much of which resulted from ignorance of the contributions and customs of diverse cultural groups in American society.

In July, 1941as World War II was being waged by ultranationalists in Germany and Japanan obscure book review in the New York Herald-Tribune advocated “multiculturalism” as an antidote to nationalism. The term reappeared in a Canadian government report on bilingualism in 1965 that recommended “multiculturalism” replace the “bicultural” policies of Canada that had been granting linguistic equality to English and French.

Civil Rights Movement

Meanwhile, in the United States, the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination in employment, government facilities and programs, public accommodations, and votingoutlawing racial segregation in most areas of public life. In an executive order the following year, President Lyndon B. Johnson mandated government contractors to engage in “affirmative action” by hiring qualified members of minority groups previously excluded. Discrimination was also outlawed in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965which resulted in a considerable increase in non-European immigrants.

The movement that produced civil rights legislation also pressured American universities to establish ethnic studies programs. The premise for this movement was that the historical status of nonmainstream cultures in the United States had been neglectedconsistent with a policy of assimilationist Anglo-conformityso the research agenda was to uncover the contributions of diverse minority groups to the United States, document patterns of discrimination, and otherwise enrich American scholarship by focusing on the cultural diversity of the United States. Educational institutions then voluntarily adopted programs of affirmative action, even though they were not required by law to do so.

Because not all employers voluntarily complied with affirmative action and nondiscrimination requirements, members of minority groups felt as frustrated as government officials who monitored that lack of progress. Concrete programs were needed to overcome resistance attributable to stereotypes and other factorsmmigrants with cultural practices that did not conform to the mainstream were particularly disadvantaged. For example, members of minority groups traditionally known for being employed in menial labor had difficulty being hired for white-collar jobs. In addition, federally funded mental health programs served few minorities, partly because many members of minorities were recent immigrants from countries in which the concept of mental illness was not understood as a treatable medical condition. To overcome favoritism toward members of the majority group, employers and directors of mental health and other government-funded programs were urged to adopt cultural sensitivity training, which relied heavily on the scholarship of ethnic studies researchers.

Cultural sensitivity training was designed for adults, and it appeared it would be needed as long as children grew up with mistaken and stereotypical ideas about ethnic groups based on ignorance. Accordingly, curriculum reform from kindergarten to college was on the education agenda during the 1970s to ensure that young people would have more respect for minority cultures that would translate into better utilization of government programs and nondiscrimination in employment. In Lau v. Nichols (1972), the U.S. Supreme Court ordered schools to assist language-minority childrenprimarily immigrantsthrough bilingual and English-as-a-second-language programs.

Multiculturalism soon experienced many new forms of government supportapproval of radio and television stations in minority languages, funding for minority arts and music, financial aid to minority businesses, scholarships for minority students, voting on ballots in minority languages, and acceptance of holidays for minorities. The establishment of African American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday as a federal holiday in 1983 is an example of the latter.

Focus on the special needs of underrepresented groups broadened in scope. Women were the first to benefit, as employment discrimination based on gender was outlawed in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Other forms of discrimination were banned in subsequent years. The term “multicultural” was later interpreted to encompass respect for people of different ages, physical and mental capabilities, sexual orientations, and gender identities.

Commercially, multiculturalism has been profitable. From the sale of traditional furniture and items such as “Black Is Beautiful” sweatshirts, marketing campaigns directed at members of different cultural groups has been successful. At the same time, owners of cinemas have converted single-screen theaters into multiplex operations that can offer films to multiple niche markets simultaneously.

Backlash Against Multiculturalism

Perhaps inevitably, some multicultural innovations were badly designed or implemented. However, the general, incremental progress of multiculturalism gradually rankled many people in the mainstream who resented being labeled as “Americentric,” “Eurocentric,” “parochial,” or “prejudiced,” or who otherwise felt they were being vilified. The main premise of the counterattack was that the United States was basically a product of Western civilizationany attempt to divert attention from that foundation imperiled national unity and undermined fundamental values. For the critics, multiculturalism had gone too far.

One of the endangered values was said to be respect for competence. Some beneficiaries of affirmative actionnotably students at leading universitieswere told they had been admitted to the institution merely because of their ethnicitynot because they were qualified. When private businesses were pressured to fill what they perceived as ethnic quotas in their workforce, white male job applicants cried out against “reverse discrimination.” The same was true of many disappointed applicants for entry to prestigious universities.

Whereas cultural pluralists view each culture as making unique and valuable contributions to a collectively shared mainstream, multiculturalists were accused of being more concerned with preserving the distinctions among cultures. Accordingly, the aim of bilingual education morphed from serving as a transition to English-language literacy for immigrants into a permanent track in elementary and secondary education in which the entire educational curriculum might be learned in a language other than English, potentially stunting the ability of immigrants to rise in social mobility. In Hawaii, for example, residents with Native Hawaiian ancestry were provided opportunities to attend schools in which the initial language of instruction was Hawaiianwith English introduced for the first time in the fourth grade.

Another criticism of multiculturalism was that the teaching of basic American history was being eclipsed by too much attention to minority history. Because fundamental principles of American culture and democracy were treated as an orthodoxy that needed to be challenged, the resultaccording to criticswas cacophony and confusion in the minds of students, including members of minority groups themselves.

Multiculturalism was said to unleash identity politics and political correctness. Identity politics involved the pursuit of public policies by each ethnic group without cooperating with other ethnic groups, sometimes resulting in advocacy of conflicting solutions and lack of progress for all groups. Political correctness meant that one would be accused of being a racist for making factual statements about group characteristics or for posing hypotheses about differences among various ethnic groups. Multiculturalists responded that such statements created a “hostile environment” for students and workers, producing what critics described as a chilling effect on what could be said in public.

Philosophically, multiculturalists were attacked for advocating a relativism in which everything is both true and not truedepending on one’s cultural perspective. Social science was questioned as inherently ideological, so college debates regarding differences of opinion on public policy issues were no longer focused on achieving consensus but instead on mobilizing support among minorities to prevail over the traditional mainstream view, or vice versa.

Alternatives to Multiculturalism

Both monoculturalism and multiculturalism were eventually challenged by interculturalism. The latter view holds that members of different cultures should learn from one another, rather than have one culture prevail or allow diverse cultures to become separatist. Interculturalists strive to find commonalities and consider differences as subcultures.

Another alternativepolyculturalisminsisted the world’s cultures have been in flux in part because they have influenced one another for centuries, are interrelated, and therefore possess common values that should be stressed. Those who had long said that they were “citizens of the world”rather than nationalistsnow resided under the banner of polyculturalism.

The election of Democratic senator Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency in 2008 was expected to open a new chapter on multiculturalismmany anticipated that this first African American president would adopt “postracial” public policies that would bring Americans together after decades of “culture wars.” Obama spent the first eighteen years in his life in Indonesia and Hawaii, outside the American mainland, and with relatives on four continents as well as in the mid-Pacific. His values were shaped by multicultural experiencese also taught American constitutional law with a focus on civil rights. His apparent interculturalist message was that diverse Americans should listen to one another in order to achieve pragmatic solutions to festering problems. Many observers hoped his message would be translated into action during his presidency. However, the Obama years proved to be racially divisive, and the multiculturalism debate was renewed during the 2016 presidential campaign and became an apparently partisan issue as Republican candidates voiced their opposition to political correctness in politics and society at large or to a lack of assimilation.

Twenty-First Century Immigration Issues

In the twenty-first-century, the United States became caught up in a global conundrum facing developed countries. This was where non-immigrant populations in developed countries experienced declining birth rates and longer life expectancies. The result was that older societal segments in the developed world were growing larger, while numbers in younger demographics contracted. Many Western countries met labor shortfalls by encouraging the entrance of a large number of immigrant workers. These same societies, nonetheless, came to feel their native cultures to be at risk by the presence of foreign newcomers. Ironically, many of these Western countries had culturally transformed societies outside their borders as colonizers in previous centuries. This situation had reversed itself in the twenty-first century.

Some countries such as Canada were forthright in acknowledging their dependence on immigration to meet labor and population replenishment needs. In other countries, right-wing nationalist movements emerged and threatened to become the popular ruling party of many Western governmentsa situation not experienced since the end of World War II in 1945. Countries demonstrating these trends included France, Germany, Norway, Holland, and others.

In the United Statesas in other countriesan inherent result of increased immigration flows was multiculturalism. Larger numbers of immigrant populations originating from more diverse global locations resulted in greater multiculturalistic encounters in everyday lifehis could include things like television programming in different languages, changes in local cuisine, or music. For native-born populations accustomed to a population majority and traditional, cultural ways of life, these changes were unsettling. Nonetheless, in the 2020s, percentages of native-born populations in the United States were, again, shrinking and getting older. This was best exemplified in the deep Southern state of Texas. In 2022, Texas enjoyed the world's eighth-largest economy economy, ahead of entire developed nations such as Canada. A strong labor force was needed to sustain this developmental growth and was indeed supplied by immigrants. Beginning in 2023, Hispanics overtook the White population as the state's largest demographic. These changes resulted in many nativist movements that sought to overturn these societal changes they believed were occurring because of large-scale immigration into the United States.

In the mid-2020s, the political response of the United States more resembled that of Western Europe. The spotlight the topic of immigration assumed in presidential elections was a prime illustration. For example, beginning with his first public statement announcing his candidacy in 2015, Donald Trump made immigration a central theme of his three presidential campaigns (2016, 2020, 2024) and presidency (2017-2021). The American public came to accept immigration as a core national issue. Immigration reduction and border control evolved into important party platforms for both parties.

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