Nationalism and Attitudes Towards Immigrants: Canada and Taiwan Compared

Leslie Laczko, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada  K1N 6N5
and
Ming-Chang Tsai, National Taipei University, Taipei, Taiwan

Nationalism and Attitudes Towards Immigrants: Canada and Taiwan Compared

Canada and Taiwan are both developed societies with a full range of class cleavages.  Both are “new societies” that grew out of waves of settlement from elsewhere.  Both have a complex internal ethnic structure, with two large majorities, aboriginal minorities, and waves of more recent immigrants.  In recent decades, both societies have experienced important re-definitions of the relationship between the aboriginal segments and the larger society.  In Taiwan, the cleavage between the long-established Taiwanese and Mainlanders is an overarching one that has ramifications in many areas of political life.  This parallels Canada’s linguistic dualism.  In Canada the history of dual European settlement has led to a bilingual society with a full range of separate French-language institutions centered in Quebec,  and the language cleavage is an overarching one.  Both societies are also immigrant societies with ongoing debates on various aspects of immigrant integration.   National identities are complex and evolving in both societies, and relations with a larger neighbor (USA, PRC) play an important role in each setting. This paper will summarize and juxtapose some findings from Canada and Taiwan from the 2003 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) data set on national identities in 34 countries.  In both societies, civic and ethnic definitions of nationhood co-exist in tension, and attitudes towards immigration are mixed and contradictory.