But the current immigration program basically asks for that; bringing in the rich and educated from other countries, yet not allowing them or their cousins to get jobs outside of the basic service industry of store clerks and manual labourers. I actually quite like allowing immigrants to bring in their cousins, grandparents and siblings into the country. However, the model that basically tells them to do nothing is useless. We say we want them to be contributing members of the economy, but we tell them to do nothing, and we say we want to integrate them, but we also say we want this country to be a cultural mosaic. I really don't think that it's such a good thing that Australia siphons off all the rich, educated, westernized foreigners and forces them to leave their family members behind because they can't contribute directly to the all-powerful economic engine of the country.
A better system would try to emulate the situations of where people came from, instead of giving them cookie cutter american dream lives with just a generation or two of chinese speakers to bring the culture. I'd much prefer to have entire separate economies based on where people come from, allowing a little bit of everything everywhere. We say that we're multicultural, but to me it seems more like "racially accepting and loving to hear people say things I don't understand on the bus." Everyone wears the same clothes, and if you saw an Indian man on the subway, you wouldn't be able to tell if he was 1st generation or adopted and brought up in the suburbs by white parents. Is it too much to ask to actually see a bit of different cultures everywhere, not disguising your mosque as a community centre, or your indian restaurant as a fast food chain?
That all said, I think that Canada's the closest to achieving true multiculturalism. Like countless things in this country, it just requires a new generation of good, active thinkers and a display of the will that's in many Canadians today.