■"As Muslims Call Europe Home, Dangerous Isolation Takes Root: In France, 'Political Islam' Preaches Intolerance; Challenge to Secularism; Push for Virginity Certificates," by Ian Johnson and John Carreyrou, Wall Street Journal, 11 July 2005, p. A1.
■"More Immigrants, More Jobs," op-ed by Stephen Moore, Wall Street Journal, 11 July 2005, p. A13.
Europe seems amazed that when their states don't do much to integrate incoming Muslim immigrants, these people seem to hole themselves up in ghettos and over time, instead of feeling more at home, they feel more ill at ease, leading to second- and third-generations of Muslims who are more intolerant than their parents.
Of course, what they're mostly intolerant about is how many young Muslims today seem to be abandoning their cultural and religious identity in Europe, so the mosques tend to get filled up with pissed-off elders and extremely intolerant young people (the rest are off partying), so when bombs go off in Madrid or London, the press jumps all over these mosques, finds plenty of hate-mongering in them, and then publishes astonished pieces about all this "festering anger."
Do you know why radical Islam seems to flourish in America primarily in prisons? It's because the Muslims we attract tend to be more educated than those that migrate to Europe (in effect, their Hispanics who do "3-D" jobs, as in dirty, dangerous and difficult). So Muslims in America tend to integrate economically, on average, better than those in Europe.
Of course, there are plenty of Americans who fear the ghettoized, "breeding-like-crazy" Catholic Latinos, but the reason why Latinos aren't generating similar terrorist groups (although they do have their gangs, or mafia, like any incoming American immigrant wave) is because there's enough economic opportunity here and upward mobility.
America tends to suck in immigrants during periods of great economic expansion (quelle surprise!). Our four big waves were: 1) the original Europeans, 2) the tons more (especially "Germans," a term used to describe all European immigrants who didn't speak English in the mid-19th century) who followed on in the middle of the 1800s, 3) the big bulge who came in the first two decades of the last century (the Ellis Island crowd), and 4) the bulge since 1980.
Strangely enough, though, unemployment has decline steadily since the early 1980s (7.5% to 5.1%) even as the foreign-born percentage of our population rose from 6% to 12%. So this huge influx of immigrants happens to correspond to two of the biggest growth decades in American history.
In the end, Europe has a lot more to fear about a Global War on Terror than the U.S. does. Europe is closer to the action of the Middle East, can't possibly stem the tide of Muslim immigrants, and seems addicted to a life-style and economic growth-rate choice than makes it far harder for the region to integrate immigrants.
So Europe was great at sending people away for two centuries, but poor at bringing them in.
This is why I remain so optimistic about America, despite the consistent fear-mongering of those who blame globalization for everything that's wrong-or to justify every threat they can imagine.
| Permalink |
