Language Requirement
In order to become a naturalized citizen, the applicant needs to understand English. This means that he or she must be able to not only understand English, but also be able to read, write, and speak understandable English. There are a few exceptions to this rule. Those who are over 55 and have lived in the US for 15 years are not required to learn English. Also, those who are over 50 and have lived in the US for 20 years are exempt. Finally, those who are mentally impaired are not required to learn English to become a naturalized citizen.
A number of books have criticized multiculturalism, but even if you’ve already read a bunch of them, Salim Mansur’sDelectable Lie: A Liberal Repudiation of Multiculturalism is still very much worth your attention. Mansur, a syndicated columnist who teaches political science at the University of Western Ontario and whose previous books include Islam’s Predicament: Perspectives of a Dissident Muslim, approaches multiculturalism from the distinctive viewpoint of a naturalized Canadian citizen who is also a secular Muslim born on the Indian subcontinent. At once very knowledgeable about the history of multiculturalism and richly steeped in the long tradition of Western ideas about individual liberty (of which he rightly recognizes multiculturalism as a profound philosophical violation), Mansur is also a highly effective polemicist. Although awash in learned references to thinkers ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek, Mansur’s book is eminently accessible, and should be of interest to any reader who is concerned about the threat that multiculturalism poses to the Western heritage of freedom.
It’s significant that Mansur is Canadian, because Canada, as he puts it, was “the first major democracy to experiment with designing a society on the basis of multiculturalism.” He recounts the origins of this policy, which took shape largely as a response to growing pressure for Quebec’s independence (or, at the very least, for radical revision of its position in the Canadian confederation). This pressure led to Prime Minister Lester Pearson’s 1963 establishment of a Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, which in turn eventuated in the formulation of an official multicultural policy in 1968 by the government of Pierre Trudeau. Thus began Canada’s shift from a liberal democratic society that supported individual rights to a nation that placed the rights of the group above those of the individual – a process that reached its culmination under Brian Mulroney, during whose prime ministership, Mansur maintains, “Canada became the first western liberal democracy to adopt multiculturalism as the defining characteristic of the country.”
Multiculturalism, Mansur reminds us, was born in a time when the nature of immigration to North America had changed radically. A century ago, relocating from the Old World to the New was an expensive proposition; people left the lands of their birth “with some certainty of never returning”; they put the past behind them and began a new life, grateful to receive opportunities not offered to them back home. Yet all that changed, changed utterly – and a big reason for the change, as Mansur shrewdly points out, was “the arrival of wide-body aircraft,” which ended up “blurr[ing] the difference between immigrants and migrant workers.” All too many of today’s so-called immigrants to the West, after all, are not truly immigrants in the traditional sense but are, rather, people “situated in two countries…only a few short hours removed from their native lands.” They don’t break their ties to the old country, don’t undergo a dramatic psychological adjustment of the sort that was once a natural part of the immigrant experience. Nor do the countries to which they “immigrate” expect of them what they used to expect of newcomers from abroad: today’s “immigrants” can become citizens of a Western country even if they utterly despise its core values and spend much of their time back in the places they “immigrated” from.
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