Multiculturalism: Always Was, Always Will Be

Arnhem Land, Australia, 1650: expat Makassans run trepang processing plants with their local joint venture partners.

Even after white settlement, during Australia's supposedly 'pure' settler period, you had Chinese on the gold fields and in veggie gardens, and blackbirded Islanders on sugar plantations.

Even the most remote societies have always been multicultural, to varying degrees. Tribes since the dawn of humanity have bumped and mingled. Nudge nudge, wink wink.

Steppe people, no!

The notion that multiculturalism erodes social cohesion is therefore false.

So what actually does?

The persistence of multiculturalism implies the presence of attitudes to how multiculturalism should look and operate. These can include:

• Egalitarian: Emphasizing equality and fairness among all cultural groups.
• Integrative: Promoting the integration of different cultures into a unified whole.
• Hierarchical: Maintaining a hierarchical structure where certain cultural groups are dominant over others.

Policies that reinforce prevailing views on multiculturalism are seen as contributing to social cohesion. e.g., the UAE increasing migrant worker intake but maintaining segregated accommodation.

Policies that challenge established norms and values are perceived as threatening social cohesion. e.g., anti-racism policies in a country with a history of racial hierarchies facing resistance from those wanting to maintain the status quo.

Change in multiculturalism drives fear for social cohesion rather than multiculturalism itself.

TLDR, your multiculturalism, which celebrates difference but attacks inequality, is socially corrosive, but mine, in which everyone knows their place and follows the rules, is not. 

The American deep south was ok with multiculturalism when it was slavery.

Perhaps the only thing recent about multiculturalism is arguing about multiculturalism, although I'm sure a few Yolngu edge-lords hurled some blood-and-soil BS to make the Makassans feel unwelcome.

If multiculturalism always was and always will be, then instead of arguing about whether multiculturalism is a failed experiment, we should be confrontingly honest about what sort of multiculturalism we want.

Being of the neo-liberal persuasion, I am skeptical of 'social cohesion' anyway. In my experience, it is virtue-signalling nonsense attached to shibboleths crying out to be streamlined away. Just because an institution like sexism is old doesn't mean it should survive.

Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society" can be taken to mean that there is no static, monolithic cultural collective consciousness into which we can expect immigrants to sufficiently assimilate before they can be accepted. 

A society free from collectivism gives loaded concepts like 'social cohesion' no purchase. More positively, it enables both natives and immigrants to embrace individualism.