Page - 227 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Round Table Discussion | Worst Case and Best Practice 227 It would strike me that it would be a fairly short step to have a woman with a veil doing the news cast, especially now that “Little Mosque on the Prairie” has made the way. That’s like the easy part. The tougher part is, get the media to move away from “us vs. them” and to think of news as “we”. From the audience Regarding this ranking of Rainer Geißler, there’s one remark I’d like to make, linking it with what Augie Fleras said about the immigration societies. There, of course, this acceptance by the population was built into the system. Canada was open, largely; therefore immigration was the norm for centuries. And in the United States, it was the same. All Americans, the sole exception may be the Native Americans, were descendants of immigrants and aware of it. And even if they didn’t like the late comers – the protestants didn’t like the Irish, the Irish didn’t like the Germans, the Germans didn’t like the South-East Europeans, the South-East Europeans didn’t like the Asians, okay. But they took them all in; that was the norm. Whereas in Europe they didn’t have this ideology. I think this is very much an elite discourse, which is typical of Europe: You have an elite discourse, then maybe you hold a referendum and then the Dutch and the French, just like with the European Constitution, say “no”. Then you say: “Well, what do we do?” And you go around it. The consensus in the German society, in Swiss society, in Dutch society is missing. So the elites don’t know what to do because the population hasn’t been born into it. In Canada, in America, there’s much criticism – “So many Hispanics” – but there’s by and large a consensus “We are an immigrant country”. This consensus has now arrived in the elites. The German elites say: “Yes, we are a country of immigration.” But that’s only the elites. The population says: “Well, we’re not overly happy about it.” So that’s the problem. Because, of course, these are the constituents, this is the mass of the media audience. So it is a media problem, but it is also a democracy problem. The majority of the population is not very much pro-immigration – unlike in the U.S., unlike in Canada. Which I think explains, to a certain degree, why North Americans do better in such a ranking. Augie Fleras I would like to point out that we mainly use the term “immigrant society” not only in a descriptive sense to indicate that there are, let’s say, 250,000 new Canadians. And note that the term we use is “New Canadians”: They are Canadians, or we assume that they are going to be Canadians. But there is also a kind of