The United States of America is the largest receiver of immigrants in the world, reported the German science magazine geo.de. People of different ethnicities have become neighbors and members of the same country ever since, but in this era of migration, it happens at a speed and intensity that has not been known before.
In years leading up to the 1990s, people left their home countries only under force and due to war or poverty, said Stephen Castles, an Australian sociologist, to geo.de. A globalized economy, the business of cheap flights and mass media are the empowering forces whereby people from all nations are mixing more and more, he said.
Ola Wiebe, a senior from Sweden majoring in business finance, converted to the LDS Church only a couple of years ago, and recently married at BYU–Hawaii his wife, Mele, who is from Tonga. “I have kind of an open mind,” he said. “When I started to date my wife, people would say, ‘You shouldn’t date a Tongan.’ Even my parents thought it was weird. And people now ask me how it is with the culture differences, but I don’t have any problems with it.”
Tevita O. Ka’ili, department chair of the ICS program, said the mix of cultures and ethnicities gets people to “open up more. They are more connected, but there is also a challenge because there is the question of identity. Not everybody just wants to be part of a global identity. They want to still have their own distinction.”
Josh Beijerling, a freshman majoring in graphic design, had difficulties pointing to a single country to call his place of origin. His father is Dutch and his mother Japanese and he has lived in diverse places of the world, from Hawaii, New Zealand and Japan to the Netherlands and the US. “I don’t think you can define my nationality and culture,” he said.
Emma Jugganaikloo, a freshman from Idaho majoring in ICS-peacebuilding, was born in Kahuku. “My mom is white, my dad is African-Indian, and he is from Mauritius, an Indian island by Madagascar. They met at a dance here [at BYUH]. I say that I am from America, because that’s where I grew up, but I also feel Mauritian.” She said the biggest influence in identity is the environment one grows up in.
It is no longer possible to infer someone’s ethnic identity from appearance, says geo.de. When someone feels a part of more than one culture, sociologists speak of “hybrid identities.”
Ka’ili said, “[In globalization,] we definitely will lose culture in certain aspects. But new cultures will be invented.” He said certain parts of cultures endure longer than others. “Language is mostly lost after just one generation but food endeavors much longer.”
Wiebe said, “I don’t really like my own culture. In Sweden, people don’t really talk to each other as strangers. Europeans are a little bit stiffer. Polynesians are more chill, open and friendlier. I was attracted to them. I don’t really feel like I am Swedish. I am just universal. People are so obsessed with their countries they even have wars.”
Thinking of the conflict of nations in the Middle East and Europe, he said, “We are all just world citizens. If you mix cultures you have this new hybrid mind.”
In regards to the impact of globalization on the increase or decrease of racism, Ka’ili said, “There are two theories. On the one hand you have hybridization where all the world is just mixing together their traditions and we are coming together as a group. The other theory states that civilizations are just clashing because they don’t like other cultures imposing their ideas on them. A classic example is the clash between the West and the Islam.”
He continued, “I think both are happening. There is definitely some mixing but also clashing. No one is isolated anymore. You can’t just shut out the world. That’s the world we live in. And culture always changes. Maybe we are just in one of those stages.”