Multicultural confusion: Five Paradigms of Ethnic Relations

摘要

In the last forty years, the United States population has become more culturally and ethnically diverse than at any other time in its history. This is due to major changes in government immigration policies (especially the Immigration Act of 1965) as well as radical transformations in global developments, politically, socially, and economically. Even compared to the diverse demographic conditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, America in the twenty-first century is much more multicultural and multireligious. Because this has all happened so quickly, it is hard to get a handle on what impact this change is having on American life in general. It has brought forth a plethora of creative possibilities and a number of serious conflicts.