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I know this is kind of a cliche question, and something that's often mused about, especially on forums like this...
But I wanted to highlight some things in the discussion that I haven't seen a lot of people talk about.
I've been adventuring around Wikipedia, researching the various ethnic compositions of various countries, with a particular interest in traditional "immigrant societies", especially the US, Canada, and Australia, but also Brazil, New Zealand, etc...
What repeatedly amazes me is how many different major ethnic groups and ancestral diasporas are present in the US, and with such large numbers for each one - the US has so many ancestral populations with estimates ranging into the millions and upward for so many of them, from Iranians to Vietnamese to Italians to English to German to Polish to French to Turkic to Korean to Croatian to Hungarian to Norwegian to Swedish to Greek to Spanish to Armenian to Arab, etc...
It also has such large blocks of ethno-racial elements that aren't present to remotely the same extent in other anglosphere countries, or in other countries period, like African Americans - only Brazil has a comparable African population - and Hispanic Americans (up to 60,000,000!), who are an extremely diverse demographic themselves - and then Jews - the US has as many as 10,000,000 people descended from ethnic Jews! That's unbelievable to me. It has the largest estimated Romani population (up to a million), and the largest European-descended population of any country.
It seems that other discussions on here get trapped into pointing out how proportionally high the Asian Canadian population is, for example, without highlighting the obvious size differences between a country like Canada and the US. People never acknowledge the fact that those proportions often show up as smaller not only because the US has such a large population, but because tons of ancestral/ethnic groups present in the US usually number in the millions each - creating a much larger whole. So many respective ancestry groups end up always showing up proportionally smaller than they are in Canada, for example - even if they number in the 1 to 10 million+ range!
I just kind of wanted to register this amazement, and start a discussion on how the US managed to be so successful while balancing so many different ethnic, religious, and racial elements that no other country remotely has in anywhere near the same amounts. Does this make the US truly the most diverse country on earth? Please discuss below. I think it does.
Last edited by magicinterest; 01-17-2021 at 04:35 PM..
I know this is kind of a cliche question, and something that's often mused about, especially on forums like this...
But I wanted to highlight some things in the discussion that I haven't seen a lot of people talk about.
I've been adventuring around Wikipedia, researching the various ethnic compositions of various countries, with a particular interest in traditional "immigrant societies", especially the US, Canada, and Australia, but also Brazil, New Zealand, etc...
What repeatedly amazes me is how many different major ethnic groups and ancestral diasporas are present in the US, and with such large numbers for each one - the US has so many ancestral populations with estimates ranging into the millions and upward for so many of them, from Iranians to Vietnamese to Italians to English to German to Polish to French to Turkic to Korean to Croatian to Hungarian to Norwegian to Swedish to Greek to Spanish to Armenian to Arab, etc...
It also has such large blocks of ethno-racial elements that aren't present to remotely the same extent in other anglosphere countries, or in other countries period, like African Americans - only Brazil has a comparable African population - and Hispanic Americans (up to 60,000,000!), who are an extremely diverse demographic themselves - and then Jews - the US has as many as 10,000,000 people descended from ethnic Jews! That's unbelievable to me. It has the largest estimated Romani population (up to a million), and the largest European-descended population of any country.
It seems that other discussions on here get trapped into pointing out how proportionally high the Asian Canadian population is, for example, without highlighting the obvious size differences between a country like Canada and the US. People never acknowledge the fact that those proportions often show up as smaller not only because the US has such a large population, but because tons of ancestral/ethnic groups present in the US usually number in the millions each - creating a much larger whole. So many respective ancestry groups end up always showing up proportionally smaller than they are in Canada, for example - even if they number in the 1 to 10 million+ range!
I just kind of wanted to register this amazement, and start a discussion on how the US managed to be so successful while balancing so many different ethnic, religious, and racial elements that no other country remotely has in anywhere near the same amounts. Does this make the US truly the most diverse country on earth? Please discuss below. I think it does.
Well the diversity is different with the US and the rest of the world. I live in Australia and the diversity is different. While Australia has more British, Indonesians, New Zealanders and Malaysians compared to the USA. Even the Aborigines are diverse and at one time there were at least 300 different Aboriginal languages spoken. In addition the proportion of Muslims is larger in Australia with at least 2.5% compared to the USA at 1%.
In the US, most of the immigrants from Arab countries are Christian. Yet in Australia at least half of the immigrants from Arab countries are Christian, and the other half Muslim.
Obviously Australia has a much smaller number of Hispanics and Blacks compared to the USA. Yet with the US a large majority of hispanics are originally from Mexico.
As you pointed out, OP, the US has a larger percentage of habitable land, compared to Canada, and probably Australia, as well. Otherwise, I think Canada holds its own, diversity-wise. They've been taking in quite a few refugee groups from the Middle-Eastern wars, the last few years, to name just one region.Being a British Commonwealth country, they've always had a large population of South Asians. The Commonwealth connection probably results in a population of African origin as well, I imagine. And they have East Asians, of course. They have Dukhobors, a religious sect from Russia, as well as more recent Russian immigres. I'm sure they have quite a few immigrant groups, if you take a closer look.
I know this is kind of a cliche question, and something that's often mused about, especially on forums like this...
But I wanted to highlight some things in the discussion that I haven't seen a lot of people talk about.
I've been adventuring around Wikipedia, researching the various ethnic compositions of various countries, with a particular interest in traditional "immigrant societies", especially the US, Canada, and Australia, but also Brazil, New Zealand, etc...
What repeatedly amazes me is how many different major ethnic groups and ancestral diasporas are present in the US, and with such large numbers for each one - the US has so many ancestral populations with estimates ranging into the millions and upward for so many of them, from Iranians to Vietnamese to Italians to English to German to Polish to French to Turkic to Korean to Croatian to Hungarian to Norwegian to Swedish to Greek to Spanish to Armenian to Arab, etc...
It also has such large blocks of ethno-racial elements that aren't present to remotely the same extent in other anglosphere countries, or in other countries period, like African Americans - only Brazil has a comparable African population - and Hispanic Americans (up to 60,000,000!), who are an extremely diverse demographic themselves - and then Jews - the US has as many as 10,000,000 people descended from ethnic Jews! That's unbelievable to me. It has the largest estimated Romani population (up to a million), and the largest European-descended population of any country.
It seems that other discussions on here get trapped into pointing out how proportionally high the Asian Canadian population is, for example, without highlighting the obvious size differences between a country like Canada and the US. People never acknowledge the fact that those proportions often show up as smaller not only because the US has such a large population, but because tons of ancestral/ethnic groups present in the US usually number in the millions each - creating a much larger whole. So many respective ancestry groups end up always showing up proportionally smaller than they are in Canada, for example - even if they number in the 1 to 10 million+ range!
I just kind of wanted to register this amazement, and start a discussion on how the US managed to be so successful while balancing so many different ethnic, religious, and racial elements that no other country remotely has in anywhere near the same amounts. Does this make the US truly the most diverse country on earth? Please discuss below. I think it does.
The US does not really have that many more ethnic and religious groups than the likes of Canada and Australia, it may have a few more, however for the most part the huge majority of the ethnics groups and religions that exist in the US, will also exist in Canada and Australia. The US for the most part just has more people.
And the reasons the US has more people are far more historic and geographical more than anything else. You have , far more arable land, and in the case of Australia at least, 200 more years of settlement outside of the native population.
You also have a long land border with Mexico, and a history of African Slavery, (most of Australia's slaves were British or Irish), which influence the demographics.
In 1850 for instance, Australia had scarcely 300,000 non native people, for the most part the continent was unexplored and unsettled by anyone other than the natives. The US was already a world leading economy with some 25 million non natives among the population. If you were a European fleeing war, a corrupt government or poverty from about 1800 to 1890, where would you rather go?
Though in terms of years, Australia actually went from 0 to 25 Million non natives a bit quicker than the US did.
Its fair to say the US got the ball rolling as far as large and influential immigrant groups go, and I think that is just a function of government, and the fact that you have longer history of it.
The US does not really have that many more ethnic and religious groups than the likes of Canada and Australia, it may have a few more, however for the most part the huge majority of the ethnics groups and religions that exist in the US, will also exist in Canada and Australia. The US for the most part just has more people.
Though in terms of years, Australia actually went from 0 to 25 Million non natives a bit quicker than the US did.
In regards to your first paragraph, yes it does? The US has near 50 ethnic groups numbering over 1 million, including large blocks of ethno-racial elements that simply aren't represented in Australia to anywhere near the same extent. That's what is meant. Just because Australia has Africans, for example, doesn't mean that it would be correct to attribute it to Australia being diverse - because it's African population is, in total and even proportionally, tiny, and not integrated to boot. Similarly Australia has Jews, but America's Jewish population is much more notable, and much more culturally integrated.
The fact I highlighted as impressive was how many different nationalities have their largest diaspora populations represented in the US. If not their largest, their near-largest. From Armenian to Mexican to Brazilian to South Korean to Hungarian to Swedish to Jewish to German to Dutch to French...
Diversity is how many different, and the US seems to be the country that has the most diversified ethnic makeup - including among it's European population, where it has tons of European ethnicities, many of them represented in the millions each, that Australia doesn't have to the same extent - ie, it's much more generalizably English.
In regards to your last sentence, that kind of seems immaterial when the US was at 100 million+ people by the 1910s.
Well the diversity is different with the US and the rest of the world. I live in Australia and the diversity is different. While Australia has more British, Indonesians, New Zealanders and Malaysians compared to the USA. Even the Aborigines are diverse and at one time there were at least 300 different Aboriginal languages spoken. In addition the proportion of Muslims is larger in Australia with at least 2.5% compared to the USA at 1%.
But that is what I was dispelling. The Muslim population in the US numbers near 4 million, larger than Australia's by some 3.5 million. And the US has more British and Indonesians than Australia - for the former, 34 million British Americans vs 10 million British Australians, the latter, 505,000 Indonesian Americans vs 105,000 Indonesian Australians.
As you pointed out, OP, the US has a larger percentage of habitable land, compared to Canada, and probably Australia, as well. Otherwise, I think Canada holds its own, diversity-wise. They've been taking in quite a few refugee groups from the Middle-Eastern wars, the last few years, to name just one region.Being a British Commonwealth country, they've always had a large population of South Asians. The Commonwealth connection probably results in a population of African origin as well, I imagine. And they have East Asians, of course. They have Dukhobors, a religious sect from Russia, as well as more recent Russian immigres. I'm sure they have quite a few immigrant groups, if you take a closer look.
They have far less Russians than the US does, and recent refugees aside (all countries have those) Canada historically has been more homogeneous - it's proportionally more British/French, the US has more total British and French ethnic descendants, though. It's African population isn't anywhere near as large, integrated, or diverse. Etc...
Canada is diverse, but it doesn't appear more diverse than the US, not by a bit.
I know this is kind of a cliche question, and something that's often mused about, especially on forums like this...
But I wanted to highlight some things in the discussion that I haven't seen a lot of people talk about.
I've been adventuring around Wikipedia, researching the various ethnic compositions of various countries, with a particular interest in traditional "immigrant societies", especially the US, Canada, and Australia, but also Brazil, New Zealand, etc...
What repeatedly amazes me is how many different major ethnic groups and ancestral diasporas are present in the US, and with such large numbers for each one - the US has so many ancestral populations with estimates ranging into the millions and upward for so many of them, from Iranians to Vietnamese to Italians to English to German to Polish to French to Turkic to Korean to Croatian to Hungarian to Norwegian to Swedish to Greek to Spanish to Armenian to Arab, etc...
It also has such large blocks of ethno-racial elements that aren't present to remotely the same extent in other anglosphere countries, or in other countries period, like African Americans - only Brazil has a comparable African population - and Hispanic Americans (up to 60,000,000!), who are an extremely diverse demographic themselves - and then Jews - the US has as many as 10,000,000 people descended from ethnic Jews! That's unbelievable to me. It has the largest estimated Romani population (up to a million), and the largest European-descended population of any country.
It seems that other discussions on here get trapped into pointing out how proportionally high the Asian Canadian population is, for example, without highlighting the obvious size differences between a country like Canada and the US. People never acknowledge the fact that those proportions often show up as smaller not only because the US has such a large population, but because tons of ancestral/ethnic groups present in the US usually number in the millions each - creating a much larger whole. So many respective ancestry groups end up always showing up proportionally smaller than they are in Canada, for example - even if they number in the 1 to 10 million+ range!
I just kind of wanted to register this amazement, and start a discussion on how the US managed to be so successful while balancing so many different ethnic, religious, and racial elements that no other country remotely has in anywhere near the same amounts. Does this make the US truly the most diverse country on earth? Please discuss below. I think it does.
There are many different ways to measure how diverse a population is. If the metric that you choose to work with is the total numbers of people from different ancestral homelands, then the US is the most diverse for sure; nowhere else comes close. The US is the third most populous country in the world by far and the two that are more populous (China and India) are not immigrant countries, so obviously it would be that way.
However, that is only one way to measure diversity. Here are a couple of others.
Widest range of ethnic backgrounds present in the population
If you disregard total numbers and just look at the number of different ancestries represented, then the US still probably comes out on top - there are immigrant groups from hundreds of different ethnic backgrounds in this country. I would imagine the other Anglophone countries would be pretty similar though. I am not sure where you could look this information up.
Proportional racial diversity - how dominant is the biggest racial group and how many racial groups with a relatively large proportion of the population are there
Here again the US is pretty diverse. 73% White, 12% Black, 5.5% Asian, 1% indigenous, 5% other (mostly mestizo from Latin America)
Compared with Canada (I have rejigged the stats to fit the US racial categories): 73% White, 3.5% Black, 15% Asian, 5% indigenous, 4% other. Pretty similar. Some Latin American countries would also give the US a run for its money here as there are countries where no single racial group has close to 70% of the total population.
Linguistic diversity - total number of languages spoken and how dominant (or not) are the most common languages
On this metric the US does not seem so diverse. Linguistically, over 90% of Americans speak English or Spanish as their first language (78% English and 13.5% Spanish). Even compared to other Anglophonic countries that is not very diverse - in Australia only 72% of people speak English as their first language, and no other language has more than 2.5% of the population speaking it. Of course if you compare that to somewhere like India or Papua New Guinea, then America does not seem very linguistically diverse at all.
Religious diversity -
If you look at religious diversity - the US is around 70% Christian, 25% irreligious and only around 1 or 2% for each of Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist. That is certainly less diverse than Singapore, which is 33% Buddhist, 18% Christian, 14% Muslim, 10% Taoist/Chinese folk, 6.5% Hindu and 18% irreligious.
There are of course multiple other ways to measure this too. Basically, it is impossible to answer the question "What country is the most diverse?" because there are too many different ways to measure it. I think it is fair to say that, on balance, if you combined all the different ways to measure diversity and then ranked all the countries on each way and then averaged them all out, the US would be near the top. Who knows if you would be at the very top though?
In regards to your first paragraph, yes it does? The US has near 50 ethnic groups numbering over 1 million, including large blocks of ethno-racial elements that simply aren't represented in Australia to anywhere near the same extent. That's what is meant. Just because Australia has Africans, for example, doesn't mean that it would be correct to attribute it to Australia being diverse - because it's African population is, in total and even proportionally, tiny, and not integrated to boot. Similarly Australia has Jews, but America's Jewish population is much more notable, and much more culturally integrated.
The fact I highlighted as impressive was how many different nationalities have their largest diaspora populations represented in the US. If not their largest, their near-largest. From Armenian to Mexican to Brazilian to South Korean to Hungarian to Swedish to Jewish to German to Dutch to French...
Diversity is how many different, and the US seems to be the country that has the most diversified ethnic makeup - including among it's European population, where it has tons of European ethnicities, many of them represented in the millions each, that Australia doesn't have to the same extent - ie, it's much more generalizably English.
In regards to your last sentence, that kind of seems immaterial when the US was at 100 million+ people by the 1910s.
I said Australia and Canada have a similar number of ethic groups, and they do, the numbers per group are just smaller . I would never dispute that that the total numbers in per group in the US are larger, or that the UK is far more a historical influence on Australian immigration than it is the USA, everyone knows that.
The trouble is how do you measure diversity? You talk about the 1 million Americans of Croatian Ancestry, for instance, by comparing it to about the 150,000 people Of Croatian Ancestry we have in Australia, however out of the USA pop (320 million) and Australia (26 million), in 2021 which country has more people who were actually born in Croatia and speak Croatian? - The answer is Australia.
I have said many times in this forum if you want a truly diverse nation - India would be at the top of my list.
Last edited by danielsa1775; 01-18-2021 at 01:24 AM..
But that is what I was dispelling. The Muslim population in the US numbers near 4 million, larger than Australia's by some 3.5 million. And the US has more British and Indonesians than Australia - for the former, 34 million British Americans vs 10 million British Australians, the latter, 505,000 Indonesian Americans vs 105,000 Indonesian Australians.
Yet, the US population % wise for Muslims is only 1%. Australia it is more than 1%. Yet the percent of Muslims in Australia is smaller than some European countries, and in Europe you see a more obvious Muslim presence there. In the US Muslims stick out like a sore thumb, Australia less so, but France and the UK it is less so.
With the British population, I only referring to the ones born in the UK that have immigrated to Australia. Anyway Indonesian culture in Australia is more noticable in Australia as Australia has only 25 million people. the US is approaching 350 million.
Yet Australia has the highest or second highest number percent of immigrants in the world today. At least 27% of people in Australia are immigrants. That is higher than the US where at least 14% are immigrants. So in Australia you are more likely to find people that are immigrants, than the US.
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