What Americans Don't Get About Muslim Immigration in Europe

I have a few issues with Andrew Murphy's little riff on Geert Wilders. Wilders, of course, is the right-wing Dutch parliamentarian who's been clamoring for immigration reform. He's (in)famous internationally for making Fitna, a short movie in which he lets extremist Muslims hang themselves with their own words and deeds.

Murphy, guest-blogging at Harry's Place (a U.K. outfit that's long been on my blogroll), can't complete his short essay without throwing in an oft-repeated canard about Wilders, so let's start there:

Wilders refers to the Koran as a 'fascist' book. ... If Wilders truly believes the Koran is a fascist book, then why has he not demanded 'Mein Kampf' or any of the other fascist tracts that circulate in book stores be thrown into the book burning pyre as well?

Murphy is either misinformed or happy to perpetuate the falsehood. Selling copies of Mein Kampf is already illegal in the Netherlands (and in some other European countries, such as Austria). It has been for as long as I've been alive.

More to the point, though I'm hardly a big Wilders fan, the man is actually being entirely consistent, and merely expecting consistency of others. I make amends right here and now for having previously gotten this wrong, as it's really simple enough: Wilders' point is that because Mein Kampf is considered so dangerous that the state has declared the sale of the book illegal, therefore the same limitation ought to be placed on the hate-filled tract that is the Koran. He's not in fact pushing for either book to be banned.

The Dutch are seriously wedded to the idea of gelijke monnikken gelijke kappen (which can be roughly translated as 'equal treatment,' though the closer expression in English is probably 'What's good for the goose is good for the gander'). Wilders is furthering this ur-Dutch principle. Nothing wrong with that — on the contrary. (For the record, I think banning books is by definition silly and wrong, and I will always fight for the unfettered availability of the Koran, Mein Kampf, the Bible, and even anything written by Robert James Waller.)

But let's return to Murphy. He fails to show why Wilders' fears are allegedly overblown. The politician warns of Western culture being under assault from unenlightened religionists whose beliefs are incompatible with the values that the West stands for. Why worry, Murphy writes a bit cavalierly, when

Muslims only make up about 4.5% of the entire population of Europe. Wilders doesn't take into consideration that eventually, many of these first generation immigrants will have assimilated into society and intermarried with Brits, Germans, French, etc. — and their children and grandchildren will be very much European.

For Murphy's statistic to be of any real-world consequence, you'd have to suppose that the spread of Muslims is geographically more or less even; that you can take a sample of a thousand people anywhere on the European continent and come up with 45 Muslims, give or take. But the reality for millions of Europeans is that they live in neighborhoods and cities where Muslims are now either a majority, or very nearly so. The population of the Schildersbuurt in the Hague, for instance, now consists of 90.6 percent immigrants (no typo), most of them Muslims. Citywide, the percentage is 46.2 — and growing. The nearby city of Rotterdam is on the verge of having a majority-immigrant population, with Muslims again making up by far the biggest demographic slice. If current trends continue, it'll be Amsterdam's turn in about a dozen years (this seems irreversible, considering that already, more than 50 percent of Amsterdam's children have a "non-Western background."

A reasonable question is "So what?" Yes, there is something enormously appealing about the idea of a polyglot, harmonious, multicultural society where hookah bars appear next to Japanese restaurants, and where the Turkish rug-store owner can be seen shooting the breeze with the burly tattooed white guy next door who's working on his motorbike. I savor such scenes. Parts of Amsterdam are like that. I am as susceptible as the next person to pangs of positivity when I read that my erstwhile city is home to the largest number of nationalities in the world (177, compared to New York's 150).

But you don't have to be a bigot (as many of Wilders' followers are) to see the problems outweighing the benefits.

Just step back for a moment and focus on your own town or neighborhood. Mentally remove half the current population and substitute lots of women in hijabs and burkas, and men who've grown up in a culture where honor killings are widely tolerated and Sharia justice is preferred. Now imagine that virtually none of the women are gainfully employed, and that only about 38 percent of the 40-to-64-year-olds have jobs (that's the official number for the Moroccan population in the Netherlands). The others — 62 percent — depend on welfare.

When you picture your now-transformed living environment, sprinkle in a lot of Muslim teenagers (school dropout rate roughly 60 percent) who, in the Netherlands, are disproportionately responsible for petty street crime. Almost 70 percent of under-24 Moroccan males in Amsterdam have been detained at least once, and many have an actual criminal record. Then imagine that there are in fact many more young street hooligans than the official crime statistics let on. Moroccan youth, especially, are widely observed to act out with great disrespect — calling Dutch girls hos, publicly hurling insults at white people and black Dutch citizens from Surinam for no apparent reason, openly jeering at gays, and so on.

How would you like to live in that social environment? I imagine Andrew Murphy's rainbow-colored opinions would be quite different if he were forced to live in districts like The Hague's Schildersbuurt, or Amsterdam's Slotervaart, or Utrecht's Kanaleneiland.

(Incidentally, the dropout rate alone makes an instant mockery of Murphy's belief that the way out of the problems is the "education, education, education" of immigrants. And considering that the crime wavelets I just described are mostly the work of second- and third-generation Moroccan troublemakers, I wonder if Murphy would like to reassess his somewhat blinkered view of "assimilation" leading inevitably to an identity that's "very much European.")

The stats from which I'm quoting, by the way, do not come from Mr. Wilders or some organization of Aryan weasels. They were revealed last month in the broadsheet NRC Handelsblad, Holland's newspaper of record, and the closest thing that Dutch journalism has to a New York Times or a Washington Post.

So I ask again: post-sea-change, how do you like your new city, or your new neighborhood?

The Muslim-immigrant surge in Europe's major cities is poorly understood by American journalists, who tend to paint the people alarmed by it as Chicken Littles, Islamophobes, or worse. To put matters in perspective, this, I think, is the proper analogy: Take Chicago or New York or Denver, and subject those cities to the thought experiment above. If you can honestly say that you would not mind living in a city in your own country where foreign fundies with a welfare addiction and a crime problem have begun to outnumber the original population, you're a more tolerant person than I am.

Are you?

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P.S. Americans have their own unique take on the immigration issue, and are generally less likely to find the arrival of any large group of immigrants, including Muslims, problematic. That's laudable — being a first-generation immigrant myself, I appreciate and share the sentiment. I'm generally pro-immigration (and always pro-assimilation).

But there are reasons why U.S. Muslims do not pose anywhere near the dilemma to American society that European Muslims pose across the Atlantic. Ayaan Hirsi Ali talked knowledgeably about the differences when I interviewed her for Reason two years ago. Excerpt:

For one thing, America doesn’t really have a welfare system. Mohammed Bouyeri had all day long to plot the murder of Theo van Gogh. American Muslims have to get a job. What pushes people who come to America to assimilate is that it's expected of them. And people are not mollycoddled by the government.

There's a lot of white guilt in America, but it's directed toward black Americans and native Indians, not toward Muslims and other immigrants. People come from China, Vietnam, and all kinds of Muslim countries. To the average American, they're all fellow immigrants. The white guilt in Germany and Holland and the U.K. is very different. It has to do with colonialism. It has to do with Dutch emigrants having spread apartheid in South Africa. It has to do with the Holocaust. So the mind-set toward immigrants in Europe is far more complex than here. Europeans are more reticent about saying no to immigrants.

And by and large, Muslim immigrants in Europe do not come with the intention to assimilate. They come with the intention to work, earn some money, and go back. That’s how the first wave of immigrants in the Netherlands was perceived: They would just come to work and then they’d go away. The newer generations that have followed are coming not so much to work and more to reap the benefits of the welfare state. Again, assimilation is not really on their minds.

Also, in order to get official status here in the U.S., you have to have an employer, so it's the employable who are coming. The Arabs who live here came as businessmen, and a lot of them come from wealthy backgrounds. There are also large communities of Indian and Pakistani Muslims, who tend to be very liberal. Compare that to the Turks in Germany, who mostly come from the poor villages of Anatolia. Or compare it to the Moroccans in the Netherlands, who are for the most part Berbers with a similar socio-economic background. It’s a completely different set of people.

And finally, there's the matter of borders. In America, Muslim immigrants typically pass through an airport, which means the Americans have a better way of controlling who comes in — a far cry from Europe's open borders. Forty years ago, when Europe began talking about lifting borders between countries to facilitate the free traffic of goods and labor, they weren't thinking about waves of immigrants. They thought of Europe as a place people left. America, on the other hand, has always been an immigration nation, with border controls that have been in place for a long time.

Comments

[GreginOz]

Very thoughtful, Roj! Here in Sydney, Australia there is a huge Islamic presence in the West & Sou'west. Hijabis & burkas everywhere. Since polygamy is illegal here there are a ton of Muzzie males that set their other 2 or 3 wives up in seperate households, where our luvn gummint then pays them a single mothers pension...Immigration Officials overseas actually inform them how to utilise (manipulate) Social Security programmes. They have now effectively infiltrated ALL of the 30-odd Outlaw Biker gangs (mostly Lebs) which is sparking a huge increase in drug turf wars. My Father's sometime business associate just had his brother filled with lead and buried over these turf wars a month ago! (No shit!). He was shot in front of his wife & kid. These people truly have an alien mindset. Islam never had The Enlightenment, free thought is anathema and Cultural Relativism is an abomination to them. Blood will flow...oh! And any Holy roller that marries and rapes a NINE YEAR OLD GIRL is, IMHO, a cunt.

[Jelle]

You may be quite literate and know your way with words, I doubt you have spent much time analysing your own fears, and much more time covering them up and packaging them in reason. You are xenophobic, and you'd better do something about it, like talking to these people you fear so much. Trying to second-guess their intentions of coming here (most troublemakers were born here btw) is downright silly, unless you can show the survey saying so.
You might compare well to that greg in Oz above, you will not rank any higher you despise so much.

[Rogier]

I think we can agree, Jelle, that facts are more illuminating than emotions. I have presented quite a wealth of the former with, I believe, some thoughtfulness and reason (I love how you see reason as a BAD thing!). You have responded purely with emotion, including the tired if always galling allegation of xenophobia. In the interest of generating light, not heat, you ought to try again.

[Rogier]

Also, http://www.bakelblog.com/nobodys_business/2004/12/beauty_versus_t.html

[Been there done that]

Oh for the love of... Listen.

I do live in a neighborhood (Athens, Greece, if it matters) where immigrants are now the huge majority. Most of them are Muslim, lots of them are Eastern European, some of them are from around the world. There is indeed crime, certainly more crime than there would be in a nice suburb. The standard of living is indeed low. Dirty streets and sidewalks. Jobless people with nothing to do but hang around in the park all day drinking beers. Drug addicts on the park benches. Homeless people. A lot of frustration.

So do you want some insight about how it REALLY is to be living like that? It's like living in ANY poor neighborhood. No more and no less.

I've written a full account, addressing all your points, which is obviously too big for a blog comment so I'll probably e-mail it to you. But here's the gist of it:

1) Do not confuse cultural traits derived from religion with cultural traits derived from being raised in a dirt poor, rural area, where society is organized around the extended family as opposed to the individual.
and
2) Regardless of cultural background, it's unrealistic to expect savoir vivre from a community which lives in poverty, especially when it's a minority, regarded by the natives as a bunch of heathen criminals and terrorists. Expect frustration. Relieve poverty and discrimination, and THEN we can talk about cultural backgrounds.

[Rogier]

Thanks, BTDT, I'd love to read the full account. Feel free to post it here.

Just so you know, I'm extremely skeptical of the poverty argument.

(1) I live in a state where there's a lot of poverty. Lots of rural people living life on the margins. Run-down trailers. Chronic unemployment and underemployment. Yet the crime numbers around here are among the lowest in the country.

(2) Relieving poverty is what the Dutch and other nations have been doing, as best they could, for four or five decades now, with all kinds of welfare programs. No one goes hungry in Holland. Everyone has a decent roof over their heads. Even the lowest-income families have TV (and almost all immigrants have a satellite dish), a washing machine, a couple of cell phones, and all the (other) trappings of what a mere two generations ago would have been a solid middle-class life. How much further should the efforts to "relieve poverty" go, you reckon? Double the current welfare payments? Give free lottery tickets to the poor? Government-funded Toyotas for all?

(3) A cursory look at the Muslims (immigrant and domestic) who've arguably done Western society the most harm shows that virtually none of them were poor. Many had college educations. None that I know of were motivated to do the unthinkable because their children were starving or they couldn't afford a new pair of shoes.

[Rogier]

Oh, and

(4) I grew up in an urban house with no heat except for the coal stove in the tiny living room, no shower or bath, no telephone until I was 12 or 13 years old. Going on vacation was something rich people did. My mother budgetted so carefully that she knew exactly (and despaired!) if 25 cents was missing -- not because she was a control freak, but because it jeopardized the rent or the coal bill.

This was the way it was all through our working-class neighborhood. I never heard of any crimes that took place. There must have been some, but it was so rare and low-level as to be inconsequential. FWIW.

[Abigail]

Good work, Rogier.

[John W.]

Well said. As an American who has spent a considerable amount of time in France and England, I can attest to much of what you've observed. And it must be said that this unwillingness to assimilate is not found among non-Muslim immigrants. Hindu immigrants to the UK have been successful by any measure, despite often coming from poverty. The same is certainly true of East Asian immigrants in the many countries to which they've arrived. Caribbean immigrants may be poor, but they're not the ones who boo "La Marseillaise" when the French team plays. Muslim immigrants are really a case all to themselves.

By the way, one other huge difference that must be added between the U.S. and Europe is this: there is little prospect of a Muslim takeover of the U.S. in the long-term, because most immigrants here are Christians or followers of other religions. Muslims here can't wear "2030 - and then we take over" t-shirts. The sad demographic state of Europe only seems to encourage Muslims not to fit in.