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Why Muslims Can’t Assimilate in Europe
Minimum wage laws, payroll taxes, and regulations raise the cost of hiring to the point that unskilled workers cannot find employment. The least experienced, least educated, and most discriminated against are left with few prospects. In the United States, those most affected are African American teenagers; in Europe it’s young Muslims.
Denied legal means of earning a living, some turn to criminal means. Denied constructive outlets for their energies, some turn to gangs and violence to bolster their self-images. Adolescent Swedes, Germans, and Frenchmen whose parents emigrated from the Middle East may have little knowledge of Islam but understand that it inspires fear in the countrymen who look down on them.
The combination of unemployment, anger at discrimination, anger at their lack of opportunity, and a need for respect for themselves and from others oftentimes lead them toward radical views and actions. Their anger, their unemployment, and their dependence on taxpayers all result in more prejudice against them, which — in turn — increases their anger and their inability to obtain work.
This government-created, downward spiral will not end because politicians and labor unions gain too much from pushing the laws that price unskilled workers out of the market.
Published in Culture
You could have just kept the last two words off the title and run with it. Nice essay. The same will happen here as well with our expanding welfare state.
I found it interesting during the riots in Paris years ago that youths were on the same side as workers who demanded great perks and eschewed austerity. One group wants all the benefits of high wages and the other wanted jobs, two opposing thought processes fighting a common opponent with both seemingly oblivious to the contradiction within their ranks.
This entire minimum wage issue is a faux argument.
My cleaning ladies make $25 an hour because we’ve known each other for years and I trust them with my most valuable personal possession.
Some of the part-time students that work for my business make $12- $15 an hour but my managers make three times that because I trust them with my most valuable professional possession.
American entrepreneurs understand that you get what you pay for; the U.S. government doesn’t need to remind us of this.
Some people see that as a feature and not a bug. Price the “undesirables” out of the market.
The situation described in the original post is exactly where we are headed. “Federal Data: U.S. Admits Annually Quarter of a Million Muslims.”
There is no way that this number of people will find unskilled-labor jobs here either.
I keep thinking about how India handled this problem. They basically created Pakistan as a country for Muslims.
My daughter studied in southern France, Dijon, and when she went to Paris, she was very upset about the Banlieu, the ring of Muslim projects (apartments) the surrounds Paris and in which there is very little police, and few prospects for the young people. Muslims live there, but they can’t build a life there. A year after her visit was the year these young people were setting a few cars on fire every night.
I read recently somewhere too that in Germany, the refugees will never be able to become full citizens.
Mark Steyn talks about this inability of Europe to assimilate immigrants in some of his books.
In the United States, we have sizable slums around NYC and Washington, D.C. We are simply adding to our problems. The Muslim state department placements here have some sort of “permanent resident” status, but we don’t have the jobs and housing. So the result is the same. They will accuse us of discrimination.
Muslims never assimilate anywhere they go. Two newspaper articles, 10 years and 2000 miles apart – Tucson, 1990 and Raleigh 2000. Both articles were essentially “Boy, these Muslims are really crappy neighbors.” Among other things, both articles mentioned Muslims literally looking down their noses, silently, at people who greeted them on their way to the mosque. Both described the reply from Muslims that the Qur’an teaches that Muslims should not associate or make friends with the unbeliever.
The testy relation in Tucson was highlighted, for instance, when the mosque wrote this in huge letters across the building
In response, neighbors (the mosque was in a college neighborhood) erected a plywood sign across the street saying “Submission to happiness is God.”
The Raleigh mosque was built in what had been a predominately black neighborhood. One 40-year resident said “I feel like I’m being discriminated against in my own neighborhood.”
I doubt the tensions highlighted in these articles could even be written about today, but they suggest the voluntary separation typical of American Muslim communities.
The unemployed want high wage and benefits jobs too. The inherent contradiction in the demands isn’t obvious unless it’s been pointed out to you. Often enough it isn’t obvious in spite of having been pointed out to you too.
In all fairness, I’m much more sympathetic to the Mosque’s sign.
The old-time religion is not unappealing. In a world of I’m OK you’re OK every road leads to god hippie pablum it’s comforting to have someone bound a stake into the ground and say “This is true, and the world is wrong for denying it.”
Do you think most Muslim immigrants to America are looking for unskilled-labor. Of all the Muslims I have met some 2/3rds of them where all professionals (These guys where Iranian, Pakistani, Turkish, and Lebanese). Also I think you are miss characterizing the circumstances of the Pakistani and Indian split.
American Muslims are dramatically better assimilated. America has a fair degree of religious liberty, which really does result in a better quality of religion. So, Britain has fewer Muslims than the US (also, many fewer non-Muslims), but about six times as many people fighting for ISIS. France has 50% more Muslims than the UK, but about twice the number of jihadis, which makes sense given that the French have even less religious liberty than the Brits.
Valiuth is right; India is a mixed country, with about the same number of Muslims as Pakistan (a little under a couple of hundred million). Partition was called for by Jinnah and accepted by the British and later by Nehru, but most Indians have always been opposed to it. There were numerous Muslims who wanted to have a religiously homogeneous state, but relatively few Hindus.
I’m not sure Hizb ut-Tahrir would agree.
So long as we all act like grown ups I’m sure things will work out okay.
Wikipedia on Partition.
Is it just me or are the comments acting screwy on this thread?
My impression from the news reports I’ve read lately is that the Muslim refugees are very poor.
My impression may be inaccurate.
Refugees are very poor, generally, but all migrants are not refugees.
From (I think) the US Embassy in Baghdad’s website:
James, do you feel American Muslims are more tolerant of gays and other sexual minorities? How about women’s equality? I’m sure they’re better than the ones in Europe that got protest by some topless women during a cleric debate on how to beat your wife recently. It seems, however that their are few voices in this country denouncing radical Islam and it’s cancerous thought processes.
I suspect that in the Information Age that all religions will get watered down from their more stringent beliefs but I remain very skeptical of Islam. I also think that England is more radicalized for a number of reasons. Geographic proximity being an important one and the utter idiocy of English politicians and policy makers being another.
My sincere hope for Islam is that it’s radical elements behave like the radical elements of the Christian religions. They talk in their own circles about these people going to heaven and those people going to hell( as if they’re the arbiter), or they pray for them to see the light. That’s offensive to some but not most because that type keeps to themselves beyond supporting a politician or two. I await the softening yet remain armed.
Syria’s somewhat poor, but not India/ Bangladesh/ Africa poor.
That said, it has a very underdeveloped banking sector and if you keep your savings in cash or in assets (often land) in Syria, then when you get off the boat in Greece, you’re probably pretty poor.
Indeed, it’s generally the case that if you’re fleeing a civil war that has been going on for four years, you’ll have already liquidated a lot of your assets, partly because you get a lot of emergencies when you have an evil dictator shelling your town, and partly just because business is generally bad during these times, so everyone struggles financially.
In terms of human capital, it’s not the worst in the world. You can keep a dictatorship alive through mass slaughter or mass surveillance. Until 2011, the Assads had had decades of peace from four exceptionally capable secret police forces, which meant that although people weren’t free, they were able to develop careers and such; a poorer East Germany is probably the closest parallel. Obviously, in the last four years he’s become more Stalin than Honecker, so kids are less likely to be educated, but Syria isn’t Somalia, Afghanistan, or somesuch.
Geographic proximity to where? The dominant source for both US and UK Muslims is South Asia. I don’t think that the difference between being five thousand miles away and eight and a half thousand miles away is particularly important.
Sure. American Muslims are, in general, much better integrated. Class plays a big part in this; as Charles Murray and Robert Putnam have been noting, race really isn’t all that important in the US once you dis-aggregate for wealth and geography, and American Muslims aren’t much more likely to be poor than the population at large. Indeed, they’re pretty typical of the general public in most demographic terms. They report as slightly less religious than Christians, but, again, similar in numbers.
It’s worth noting that terrorists often aren’t particularly religiously observant. The term “religious extremist” is often applied as if you get that way if you’re very religious, but like “extreme right wing” often but does not always mean “socialist”, there isn’t much of a correlation between the fervor of one’s religion and religious extremism. Same for Christians; church attendance doesn’t have much to do with whether you have a personal problem with gays. Much better to have a religiously active community that works than a barely literate ghetto in the slums.
You gotta get out and meet some DocJay! Let them speak for themselves, in all their discordant contradiction.
(My guess is not so much – yet – but when it happens it will happen first in America.)
James, the radicalized ones may not be insanely religious but their mentors are. Considering geography, it’s easier to travel around Europe than from the US . Also, it seems the SE Asians aren’t quite the bomb throwers that some Pakistanis and North Africans are.
Zafar, I hope it does happen first in America and those who fight it are ostracized as the Christians who fought it were.
I’m going to open up a gay bar next to a NYC mosque. You Mecca Me Horny or possibly Dhimmidude.
You’re right that SE Asians are the best in terms of peaceful intent, but sadly no one has a mostly SE Asian dominated Muslim demographic; Pakistan has a plurality in both countries. For South Asians, UK air travel taxes mean that it’s often about as cheap to fly to the US as to the UK and flying is essentially the only way to travel between the two countries as a practical matter.
You’re talking about Muslims who migrate from one European country to another? Britain doesn’t have significant numbers of North Africans (tens of thousands), but if you meant that part of the remark as being about France, then sure, geography is probably a problem for them.
Even for the ringleaders and mentors, day to day faith may not be a big deal. For most clergy it is, but it is not as if all the groups have a whole heck of a lot of clerical involvement.
“DocJayhad’s”
You saw it first here.
I’m sensing a leather/abaya vibe with Chechen Fighter (stripper) Shows.
I think you’d make a lot of money.
It’s pretty clear that assimilation is not high on the list of Muslims whose reaction to topless women is to knock them down and kick them to death.
From the story in the Telegraph about the protest:
As an aside, I wonder if the Black Lives Matter protesters at the Bernie Sanders rally would have been received better if they had been topless.
I don’t understand what you mean, here. Are you talking about quasi-official atheism? The revocation of the Edict of Nantes? Antidisestablishmentarianism?
All true and another example confirming Milton Friedman’s observation that open borders are incompatible with the welfare state. The welfare state is not compatible with much of what we value but that is another sad story. Still, even if we and they eliminated the welfare state, we’d have to make choices and there are several billions of non Muslims to choose from. Why would we not set priorities?