Julie Bishop Quotes
Australia has an increasingly multicultural society.
Bishop, Julie. Address on Culturally Appropriate Aged Care. Department of Health and Ageing, Australian Government, 2005.
She was referring to the Muslim immigrants who were then coming into Europe in large numbers. Europe in general, and Italy in particular, have never had the American experience of assimilation of large numbers of immigrants, and many Muslims came to Europe just for the economic opportunities but did not like or respect the culture or the values. Some even preached hatred of the Christian West and fomented terrorism. This was different from America where Muslim immigrants arrived and despite the difficulties of new immigrants most thrived and were able to assimilate yet maintain their religion and cultural customs. At the same time many American Islamic immigrants represented the more modern Islamic which valued freedom and pluralism and unlike most Muslim nations of today, appreciated the advanced, modernistic, tolerant Islam of 1000 years ago when tolerance and freedom of thought within an Islamic framework made some Muslim countries the most advanced in the world.
This is the origin of the “melting pot” term. Although British, Zangwill wrote this play for America and it was first produced in Washinton DC with Theodore Roosevelt in attendance. The theme was just the concept that most Americans think of relative to the large immigration of so many peoples to America.
This is a complaint similar to that made by anti-immigrant Americans. France, like most other countries of the world, has never had the large scale immigration of today, nor have they had such a large proportion of the same ethnicity at once—in this case, Muslim North Africans. There were never, before the last decades, enough immigrants of any ethnicity in France to have a choice of maintaining their traditional languages and culture and not learning French or otherwise assimilating. America, in contrast, had large immigrations of different ethnicities, and despite the erroneous beliefs of immigration opponents, these blocs of immigrants have wherever there was sufficient density—usually cities, they maintained their old language and other customs. However, their children and the next generation in almost all cases have abandoned the language and many of the customs of the old country. This was true of the Germans, the Irish, the Italians, the European Jews, the Russian Jews, the Scandinavians’, and the Hispanics with their different cultures.
In revolutionary America, not only were the colonists divided into revolutionists and loyalists to Britain, but among the revolutionists, there was no uniformity of manners, ideas, norms, beliefs or any other element of politics and unity. The great challenge to America and one of its great strengths is its diversity which is not a consequence of recent immigration, but has been a characteristic of the American body politic even in the Revolutionary War. Even English was not spoken by everyone as there were French, German, Scandinavian and other immigrants who had settled in the frontier and rarely came into contact with people other than those of their own family and community. The notion of a specific American culture to which which some today believe that we should return, never existed to begin with.
Most immigration reformers want to open immigration more widely. Ward wanted immigration restricted to certain ethnicities and limited. He wanted a uniformity of assimilation and not diversity.
Julie Isabel Bishop is a former Australian politician who served as Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2013 to 2018 and deputy leader of the Liberal Party from 2007 to 2018. She was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Curtin from 1998 to 2019. She has been the chancellor of the Australian National University since January 2020.
