Legal Anthropology Immigration & The Multicultural Society

Is immigration a threat to national identity? Is a multicultural society really possible?

Immigration is an issue in a lot of countries and one of the reasons is that some people see it as a threat to the national identity. Part of the problem is that immigrants are coming from different places than they did in the past. The result is that they do not have the same cultural as the people who live there. The future of the nation is going to depend in large part on how we deal with the immigration issue and how it affects our national identity.

The question of whether or not immigration is a threat to national identity is not an easy one to answer and will ultimately depend on a lot of factors. The biggest will be how much the new immigrants are expected to adapt to the culture of their new country. In some countries they are generally expected to make an effort to fit in and their ability to do so is one of the major criteria that is used in determining who will be allowed to immigrate and who won't.

Other countries are not nearly so serious about this and tend to not have the same expectations of immigrants. In these countries new immigrants often form groups with other immigrants from the same country. In many cases they will continue to live they same way that they did before the moved including speaking their native language. In these countries there is definitely a risk that the national identity could be lost.

Ultimately the real issue when it comes to whether or not immigration is a threat to the national identity is how strong that national identity was to start with. Countries that have a long history and a strong national identity tend to have less of an issue in this regard than the countries that don't. This tends to create a bit of a problem since a lot of the countries that people move to are the ones that are fairly new and which don't have the same history and national identity as older countries. This is even a bit of an issue for a country like the United States which is not all that old by the standards of a country and which was largely built by immigrants in the first place.

The general belief seems to be that a multicultural society is possible but it may require changes on the part of everybody. Expecting that all immigrants are going to adapt to the character of their new country is not realistic. Rather than worrying about protecting the national identity we have to face the fact that the identity is going to change as the makeup of the country changes. The result is that our national identity will be constantly changing. Clearly this will make some people uncomfortable but it is what is going to have to happen.