Integration and recognition of Asian Immigrants: A critical Exposition on Will Kymlicka's Polyethnic rights

The increasing trends of major-minor cultural conflicts both in developed and developing countries is one of the utmost controversial issues of recent time. Polyethnic rights idea has often appeared as an adequate clarification in the disputes of immigrants’ cultural rights and identity that clearly justify many newly added migration policies. Will Kymlicka’s liberal conception of ‘group differentiated rights and his influential normative and empirical arguments in favor of polyethnic rights endorsed immigrant’s estrangement from national minorities, refugees, and other categories of minority groups. Luck’s egalitarian idea together with the conception of polyethnic rights worked as a crucial ground for Kymlicka to uphold the required cultural rights of the immigrants. However, this paper particularly examines Kymlicka’s idea of polyethnic rights in the case of Asian immigrants in liberal democratic countries. In doing so, based on the normative method, Kymlicka’s liberal-multicultural idea along with other relevant contemporary liberal theories have been examined throughout the paper. Analyzing the nature of polyethnic rights that seems to advance considerable conflicts between individual’s rights and group’s rights, this study aims to explore how these rights are limiting actual cultural rights’ sense of the Asian immigrants. Findings show that Kymlicka’s polyethnic rights is not entirely successful to maintain the balance between individual and groups’ cultural interests and can barely uphold the deserved cultural rights of the immigrants, and therefore, cannot ensure the expected recognition and integration of the immigrants.