It's quite common, in debates about multiculturalism, immigration and integration, to hear comments about demographic change in populations, where the assumption is that these changes have had significance for "social cohesion" or the integration between populations in some respect. This is also common in comparisons. One common sentiment is that the conditions for immigration will be different in, for instance, Sweden than it will be in Canada because "Sweden is a homogenous nation while Canada is an immigrant nation". However, such comments might say more about contemporary perceptions about ethnocultural similarity and difference than they say about actual historical change. Let me explain.
"Race", "ethnicity" or "culture" are not biological "things" but rather social "things". I think that is a fairly straightforward statement, but it has some important implications for how these matters are discussed. From the above statement, it might seem like people in the early 1900s might have talk about the "homogenous peoples of Sweden", and the "heterogenous peoples in North America", but that was not the case. Rather, people in the those days discussed difference between populations, just as we are today, and they did both in Canada and Sweden.
At the time, the great concern was that of "race", based on Gobineau and the theories of "racial biology" and the assumption was that in the early times, human races were "pure", and mixing them would dilute that "purity". That was particularly detrimental, so it was argued, for the "more developed races", i.e. the blond, blue eyed "Aryans". If this seems familiar (think about Nazi race doctrine), it's no coincidence - Gobineau and the "scientific discipline" of racial biology was a great source of inspiration for German Nazi policy, but that movement was hardly the founder of the theory. Rather, those thoughts were accepted as common sense by mainstream politics at the time to a, forthe modern viewer, shockingly great extent.
In Canada, it manifested in the immigration laws. The country's first Prime Minister, Sir John A MacDonald, explicitly embarked on a programme of building a homogenous British nation-state. For that purpose, he only wanted to allow "British Aryans" to immigrate. He never met with much success in this because there weren't enough English immigrants to satisfy the needs for new settlers, and thus the government slowly expanded the number of "races" that were acceptable as immigrants, based on ideas of "compatibility" with the "English race": Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, French, Eastern Europeans, Italians, etc. Meanwhile, people of Chinese and African heritage were actively discouraged from entering the country.
In Sweden, the parliament created one of the most significant centre for racial biological studies in Europe and conducted a great many studies to categorize phenotypical difference between people living in Sweden, categorizing them into the "most developed race", i.e. people of Swedish ethnicity, which were compared to "less developed races", like Finns, Sami or Roma populations. It's interesting to note that the forced sterilization programme that was implemented after WWII was often implemented on people who belonged to these "less developed races", like the Roma.
A historical study of the treatment of "us" and "them" in public space thus clearly shows there was a great deal of worry about "them" a century ago, too. So, when I hear people talking about demographic changes today, I have to say that I'm less than convinced that these changes are particularly significant for segregation. What has happened, rather, is that the label for who is "them" and who is "us" has moved. In Sweden, "we" used to be a fairly narrowly defined category of ethnic Swedes, and "them" were Jews, Finns, Russians, Sami and Roma. In Canada, "us" were the English, and "them" were Chinese and Africans, but also, to some extent, Eastern Europeans (who were very "otherized" during WWI).
This is the legacy and historical background one has to take into consideration when issues like "social cohesion" and "cultural compatibility"is discussed in public space. The term "race" might have (for good reason) become outdated, but the basic logic seems to be the same: people who are "like us" are "not a problem", but "they", "the different ones" are. This is also why I'm so concerned with the current focus on blaming multiculturalism for segregation and the "lack of social cohesion" as the cause of social problems associated with immigration. Like in the early 1900s, this discourse lays blame on "the others" for today's dilemmas, and, also like in those days, it advocates some form of assimilation as the solution. This is highly problematic, because it distracts attention from the power relations between mainstream populations and racialized minorities who are often marginalized on the political arena.
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