Melting pot or salad bowl?

     Melting pot or salad bowl ?

This document is an article taken from the newspaper: Taipei Times. It is one of the three English-language newspapers in Taiwan? Established in 1999, it is published by the Liberty Times group, which also publishes the Chinese-language newspaper, The Liberty Times.Ralf . This article was written by Dahrendorf Gustav was a sociologist and a Germano-British politician, considered one of the founders of the authors' theory of social conflict. "

The text we’re analyzing is given with a picture that shows a street in London. We can see in the back ground a double decked bus which symbolizes London city, with the British flag and many houses. In the foreground, women are walking down the street. These women are veiled and walking alone with others wearing European clothes .                                             This article deals with the subject of the human migration around the world and it can be divided in 3 parts.

In the first part, the journalist aims at showing the historical portrait of US and British migration. In fact, according to the author, there are differences between migration yesterday and today. We can start by talking about the scale of migration that has changed; we notice that there are more migrants today compared to the number of migrants yesterday.                                                                                                                                                As a matter of fact, migrants yesterday didn’t have a definite destination to go to but now any developed country will do, so long as it is a land of opportunity, with better prospects and a higher standard of living Before, they used to mix with each other and everyone tried to become an American citizen, for example, which means that they forgot about their own tradition and culture. They tried to adjust without imposing themselves.                    Nowadays, migration has changed. Its modern form raises massive problems and as the journalist said “serious social issue”. Every migrant brings his own habit and culture to the receiving country which may bother the original citizens and that brings us to the salad bowl. As in North America, no longer are all US citizens Americans. They have become hyphenated Americans like: “Hispanic-Americans, African-Americans… “ And I personally completely understand their point of view.

In the second part, Ralf Dahrendorf is showing the evolution of the migration.  The new immigrants to the USA are somehow different from the old immigrants, in fact the new ones are, attached to their believes and cling to their tradition, values… They live in groups ignoring the possible coexistence between backgrounds.  That’s why the author talks about melting pot to describe old immigrant and salad bowl to talk about new ones.                      The melting pot is actually a metaphor for a heterogeneous society becoming more homogeneous, the different elements ‘melting together’ into a harmonious whole with a common culture. The  melting-together metaphor was in use by the 1780s. After 1970 the desirability of assimilation and the melting model was challenged by proponents of multiculturalism, who assert that cultural differences within society are valuable and should be preserved, proposing the alternative metaphor of the mosaic or salad bowl- different cultures mix, but remain distinct.  It is particularly used to describe the assimilation of immigrants to the United States. In fact, the new ones draw a line between them and Native Americans and live in groups corresponding to their background. And that’s what lives us to ask some essential questions.

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