Australia, Canada and the United States: Ethnic Melting Pots or Plural Societies?

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Abstract
Structural similarities in these three societies have produced in each of them two very different situations of race and ethnic relations. First, in the 'frontier' situation the European immigrants displaced the indigenes both geographically and culturally, and created similar systems of internal colonialism to deal with the dispossessed remnants of aborigines and Amerindians. Second, large numbers of largely European immigrants settled mostly in cities, and gradually became assimilated into the Anglo mainstream of their host societies. While the label of 'Anglo-conformity' describes the process of assimilation better than that of 'melting pot', there is no question that the European immigrant groups became a relatively homogenous amalgam. It is predicted that the 'ethnic revival' of the 1970s will not significantly reverse this process of assimilation, and that only Canada, with its large, stable territorialized French minority, faces a serious possibility of ethnic separatism.

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