I agree with the second part of your post. I disagree with your assesment. I think that sub cultures for sure exist but there does tend to be a meta unifying culture that passes through those lines. Thats why, as diverse as Toronto already was, the new wave of Indian immigrants, are still not assimilating smoothly.
I don’t disagree that there’s necessarily a “meta unifying culture,” but I think it’s very meta—like, very broad.
For example, I live in Wisconsin. And we have cities/towns with really big German or Norwegian populations. If you go to Stoughton, WI, like every 4th house has a Norwegian flag displayed. One town (Watertown maybe?) has a big mural welcoming you to town written in Norwegian.
And no one cares, it doesn’t cause any friction. People are either Norwegian themselves or if they aren’t, they find it kind of charming, and no one cares if they speak Norwegian or German, if they have their holiday myths like Krampus, or put their shoes out for Saint Nicholas, or whatever.
—But I’ll bet you that if all those flags were the Mexican flag, and that big mural welcomed people to town in Spanish, it’d be a different story.
So why is that? I’d argue because as white Europeans, we don’t find other European cultures as different, foreign, or “other.” People feel differently when it’s an African culture, or Mexican, or Haitian, or whatever.
So we could say there’s a meta-culture, but it’s very very broad, like “white European” or something. And we make allowances for those people that aren’t made for other immigrants, and we make demands of other immigrants that aren’t made on the European ones.
