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Schule > Englisch > Ausarbeitungen, Interpretationen und Zusammenfassungen > Immigration - Personal Comment

Immigration

Personal Comment:

To what extent minorities in a foreign country should try to maintain their own culture?
Immigrants leave their country in order to escape political or religious persecution or to seek better economic opportunities. They expect the foreign country to take care of them, to take responsibility. They hope to be welcomed. They are tired and usually they are poor and some of them are yearning to breathe free. The principle is that they want a strange country to do them a really huge favour. They have the position of an invocator.
Out of this view an adaptation to the habits and the manners of the new country should be a matter of course. It is a question of politeness to cause as little trouble as possible in the house of your host. Immigrants are free to live their culture, but only in the juridical and moral limits of the foreign country. The more different the specific habits of the incoming people from those habits of the residents are the more they have to be able to merge. In their families this minorities can maintain their traditions, but in public they should show discreetness.

It is understandable, that a family, which settled in a new country does not want its culture to be forgotten. Nevertheless it is a well-known fact that the generation, which is born in the strange country, most times orientates itself on the customs of its new environment. Sometimes this leads to a generation conflict, as it described in the extract from Hanif Kureishis novel The Buddha of Suburbia, titled When Cultures Clash. Many cultural minorities try to separate themselves from that antagonistic conditions. In cities there are often parts of town, where only immigrants of a special nationalities live. Separation, although it is the most efficient way to insure the maintenance of traditions, is the wrong way. A separated subculture can not contribute to the well-being of a whole community. But, I think, especial contribution is a service which immigrants owe to the country that offers them so much. The relationship between immigrants and the involved government should be a mutually giving and taking and that includes a careful attention to the culture of one another. According to that position the government should allow its inhabitants to maintain their culture. But it also has the responsibility to watch over the new generation, which might be oppressed by their older generation to keep their tradition pure. The idea of free will is a precious ideal of most Immigration-countries. The government should acquire the right of every resident to choose the preferred culture by themselves.

It is not only about the immigrants giving a cultural service to the government. The Immigration-countries, prosperous countries of the first world, are obliged to give protection, fulfillment of the basic needs and the chance to life their own culture, because most times these countries are indirect causer of the conditions, which made the immigrants leave their homes.

Immigrants should maintain their culture in a private sphere. They should adopt the cultural characteristics of the foreign country as long as they can do this without harming their sense of right or wrong. If they have a bad conscience with adapting strange moral customs, they should search for another country to live in.

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