A lot of emphasis is being made by many countries like England and Australia to ensure that the immigrant communities start integrating with the local people. Now my focus here is Australia as I live here and well I am sure most of what I write here would hold true for England too.
Now I am all for this process except for the fact that I get confused when they totally divide us into groups and then ask us to assimilate.
The other confusing aspect to this is, and well I might be talking from an Indian point of view here, I don't see how it would be hard for us to integrate with the locals when approximately 50% of them are....well Indians. Yes we have a bit of an issue with the other 50% but I think we do get along fine with the Asian communities as well (please note, I know India is a part of Asia but then somehow we are Indians and the rest Asians for the local people......its all about integrating see!!).
Now coming to cultures, well from where we come from taking in more culture isn't a problem as we have a mixture of lots of them anyways and Anglo culture again is not new to us as we...well we did have to suffer the pommies for a long long time. Not that we mind because if it wasn't for them we wouldn't be marching off to our Motherland.....England and demand we be taken care of after making sure we did a brilliant job for 300 years! Its not like when the English arrived on their boats.....yes boats...how ironic as isn't that the favourite mode of all the refugees coming to Australia. So as I was stating that when the English arrived on their boats to the coasts of India, the then Kings and Princes didn't make a hue and cry about them lot integrating with the local masses, although a few of them did and well we have an interesting collection from that still, it wasn't like "listen Simon, here's the deal either you and your lot start learning Hindi and eating curries and for god's sake start using your hands to do things or I may have to arrange for a boat and send you to Sri Lanka." Imagine if that would have happened.....it would be us who would be sitting on our bottom and enjoying the benefits of government assistance while our fairer brothers and sisters would be working hard to contribute the well deserved taxes meant for us!
It would be us talking about our queen saying stuff like, "Its about time that cow gave back the power to the people and started working for her money!" That said and done we would still be the world champions in IT because well whatever said and done the nerd in the most of us (excluding me of course) would still live!!
So coming back to the actual subject which I started writing about (its not as if you care, if you are reading this you're probably bored out of your wits and don't have anything better to do :P)
integrating people with the local masses is really an essential need but we should make sure that we don't pick on certain communities to implement this.