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Would the United States Become Like Belgium?
I’ll try to answer to HVT’s question about what I believe the benefit of admitting Syrian refugees to be tomorrow. Today I want to give Larry Koler’s question my best shot. Larry and several other Ricochet members asked me why I feel confident that the United States won’t end up like Belgium — in other words, with a large, poorly assimilated community of easily-radicalized, potentially violent Muslims on its hands, who bring with them the most degraded pathologies of the communities from which they come.
If the European experience of Muslim immigration has been so unhappy, Larry asked me, why should we expect the American experience to be any different?
First, I too consider this an open question, at this point, particularly given that so many of you are telling me it is. But I didn’t ten years ago, when I wrote a book titled Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis is America’s, Too. One of the subjects I wrote about — not the only one — was Europe’s experience of Islamic immigration. That part of the book received too much emphasis, though. The argument I was making was that Europe’s inability to make Europeans out of Muslim immigrants was a symptom of a wider problem; and it was that wider problem I was writing about.
Crown Forum’s sales force wanted the title Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis is America’s, Too. I didn’t like it, and didn’t feel it described the book, but I didn’t have the confidence to insist on keeping my title. Mine was Blackmailed by History: The Sleeping Ghosts of Europe Wake. The sales force thought the books with the word “History” wouldn’t sell, and that it had to have “America” in the title, or people wouldn’t think it relevant to their lives. Perhaps they were right. The book didn’t sell all that well anyway, but perhaps it would have sold even more poorly had I insisted.
Doing the research for that book, and writing it, led me to conclude that America was so different from Europe, historically and culturally, that it was unlikely to replicate Europe’s pattern. But here’s a point I’d stress: I wrote that book ten years ago. It’s possible, as some of you argue, that the United States has been so fundamentally transformed since then that my arguments no longer apply. But if so, I submit, we have much bigger problems than the admission of 10,000 Syrian refugees.
In the first chapter, I described a series of recent terrorist attacks in Europe, all committed by Muslim radicals, and noted — this was in 2005, long before anyone had heard of ISIS — “‘The same thing will happen soon in the United States, and the bombers will come from Europe.’ They will come from Europe because it is comparatively easy to enter the United States if you carry a European passport, and because Europe is — as it has always been — the breeding ground of the world’s most dangerous ideologues.” Fortunately, it didn’t happen as soon as I thought it would, but obviously, I stand by that prediction.
The title Blackmailed by History was meant to evoke two themes:
The first theme is that Europeans are behaving now as Europeans have always behaved. Many seemingly novel developments in European politics and culture are in fact nothing new at all — they have ancient roots in Europe’s past. And what is that past? From the sack of Rome to the Yalta Conference, that past has been one of nearly uninterrupted war and savagery. Ethnic wars, class wars, revolutionary wars, religious wars, wars of ideology, and genocide are not aberrations in Europe’s history, they are its history. An interregnum from these ancient conflicts endured from 1945 to the end of the Cold War, when Europe’s destiny was in the hands of the two superpowers. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire, however, history has reasserted itself: Those disturbing sounds from Europe are its old, familiar ghosts. They are rattling their chains.
The second theme is that this history has culminated in a peculiar, powerful European mood. Europeans, especially young Europeans, sense in their lives a cultural, spiritual, and ideological void, one that is evident in the art, the language, the literature of contemporary Europe; in the way they talk about their existence in cafés, in discotheques, and on the Internet; in their music, in their heroes, in their family lives, and above all in the way they face threats to their civilization — and ours.
Two historic events in particular had reverberated through Europe, I argued. The first was the death of Christianity. Europe has in the past several centuries seen a really complete loss of belief in any form of religious faith, personal immortality, or salvation. The past two centuries may in a sense be viewed as a series of struggles to find a replacement for this loss: In France, the idea of France itself; in Germany, the mystical Aryan ideal.
The second was the utter, the complete catastrophe of the two World Wars, which put an end to every form of idealism in Europe. It’s impossible to understate the effect of the postwar aftershocks: All secular substitutes for faith, particularly those based in the notion of the supremacy of European culture, have lost their hold, and understandably so: What Frenchman can stand before the graveyards of Ypres or Verdun and without choking on the words profess his allegiance to the mission civilatrice? This loss of cultural confidence, I argued, made Europe particularly incapable of firmly asserting European values, given that it had none — beyond a sense that life should, at least, be well-ordered and pleasurable. Social and moral structures in Europe had, I argued, become bureaucratic structures: Like Turing machines, they served ends that weren’t specified and might not even exist.
“The fall of ideologies now casts a deadly shadow over every ideal,” wrote the French philosopher Chantal Delsol. Utopian ideologies were in their capacity to inspire like cathedrals, and Europe has watched the collapse of one cathedral after another, leaving modern Europeans humbled and paralyzed by self-doubt.
Now we get to the part where I have to ask myself: To what extent is this now true of America? A poll conducted in 2002 found that while 61 percent of Americans had hope for the future, only 29 percent of the French shared it, and only 15 percent of the Germans. At the time I wrote that book, suicide was the second-leading cause of death among the young and middle-aged; in the United States it was the eighth. I did not see it as an accident that Americans were both more hopeful than Europeans and more apt to believe that their country stood for something greater and more noble than themselves.
But do they still feel this way? In America, hope for the future is now, according to polls, the lowest on record — especially among older Americans. And as I’ve written here before, the American suicide rate is rising precipitously, even more so if you consider drug overdose as a form of suicide.
At its fundament, the radicalisation of European Muslims is a distilled form of anti-Occidentalism. It derives from this group’s profound alienation from Europe. A large part of this alienation is socioeconomic: The social and economic composition of the Muslim community in Europe is different from that of the United States. In the United States, Muslims are geographically dispersed; in Europe, they are concentrated and ghettoized. In the US, Muslims are largely middle-class professionals; in Europe, most remain stubbornly stuck in the working class or unemployed underclass. This is not the cause of the terrorist impulse. (The terrorists themselves tend to be strikingly prosperous by comparison.) Terrorism is caused by an ideological virus. But this virus propagates best under certain breeding conditions: Societies with large cohorts of frustrated, hopeless, unemployed young men find their immune systems compromised when diseases of the soul are at large. In this respect, there is now a parallel to the United States; and perhaps it’s a warning sign that there are a shocking number of young, male Americans — radicals without access to an Islamist ideology, but radicals all the same — who feel most alive when committing acts of sensational violence.
Muslim immigrants to Europe were never expected to integrate. They were never expected, even, to stay in Europe: They were brought to Europe to fill postwar labor shortages in Europe’s factories. They were never truly welcome; and they knew this all too acutely. The experience of immigration wasn’t redemptive, as it has historically been in the United States; it was bitter.
To quote again from the book:
No one but a fool would argue that the United States is free from religious and ethnic tension, that immigration is an uncontroversial issue in America, or that there are no Islamic radicals in the United States. It is a difference of degree — but differences of degree can amount to a difference in kind.
Another key point: Education and social class upon arrival appear to account, in Europe, for the radically different markers of assimilative success in immigrant communities — far more so than religious belief. The evidence? In England, for example, Muslims immigrants whose parents were educated, English-speaking professionals fared just as well as Hindus.
Why, I asked — and again, this was in 2005 — were Bangladeshi and Pakistani immigrants to the United States less alienated, less economically marginalized, and less anguished than those in Britain, and why did they show less inclination toward antisocial behavior, including Islamist violence? I concluded — after considering several hypotheses — that the key lay in Britain’s class structure, a stubborn relic of the feudal era, which made upward mobility a remote dream. By contrast, the United States has always been a country of settlers: The idea that an immigrant may arrive penniless on Ellis Island and become, through thrift and industry, a millionaire has until recently been a central and defining trope of American national mythology.
But most important distinction is something hardest to quantify: Immigrants to America have always wanted to become American. Choosing America, as the Brazilian poet Nelson Ascher wrote to me, “usually implied accepting Rilke’s dictum: You must change your life. … Muslims who opt for the U.S. do it because they are tired of being Muslims and want to keep, in the long run, at best, only some culinary habits. Not so in Europe.”
The book is about many other things, including my fear that other historic sources of European radicalism had only been temporarily stilled. I fear I’m right about that. Anyway, you can read the whole thing to see all of my arguments spelled out, with footnotes, but in essence: I assumed the United States of 2005 would readily assimilate Muslim immigrants as completely as it had every other kind of immigrant before.
But perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps the loss of two wars, the financial crisis, and the Obama administration have so fundamentally destroyed America’s boisterous self-confidence, its Borg-like ability to take any human being and make him an American, that admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees would be the last straw.
If so, however, the Syrian refugees are not the problem.
I’ll close with what I thought perceptive comments from Josh Treviño’s Facebook page:
… the purported cultural and political perils of mass immigration are actually societal weaknesses of the destination countries. (All things being equal, added population is added economic activity, which is added power: a good thing.) If you’re a nation with a robust birthrate and a Jacksonian sense of self, and you don’t mind demanding its swift adoption by new arrivals, then those arrivals can be properly additive. If on the other hand you are barely managing a replacement birthrate and you aren’t terribly sure it’s fair to make the folks just off the boat declare allegiance to the flag, whichever flag it is, then they will respond as rational people do, and de facto colonize rather than emigrate. In other words, the base problem isn’t the migrants — it’s us. …
… this passage from Hinderaker needs addressing, as it is such a commonplace on the anti-immigration right. It is wrong, but it is not irrational:
“[T]here is no possible way for the advanced Western countries to absorb the billions of people who would like to live in them, especially since most of those who want to enjoy the material fruits of Western democracy have little or no understanding of the values and principles that make Western societies successful.”
This is partly correct: the average migrant from source country X probably has little appreciation for, and still less experience of, liberal democracy and its underlying principles. The boats aren’t loaded with Jeffersonian ideologues — they’re loaded with, well, people who have experienced and understand the things they have. The reason they’re on those boats, or on that trek, is because those things have been the opposite of the fruits of a law-ordered liberty. So far so good. This is a problem.
What gets missed, however, is that it has always been a problem: the great waves of migration to the United States in particular were not a consequence of political liberality taking root in faraway lands and inspiring its adherents to cross oceans. They were consequences of a life marked by pogroms, autocracy, and rape by Cossacks; or by grinding near-serfdom in Calabria; or by brutal landlordism willing to starve your family to death in County Cork; or by genocidal violence in the fields outside Phnom Penh. We forget that the prime driver of millions of to our shores in particular across centuries was not high-minded idealism, but a sum of human misery and oppression so staggering as to defy comprehension. Sure, there are the Peter Schramms and the Lee Ung-Pyongs who fled for freedom in an atmosphere of considered appreciation for the merits of liberty — if you haven’t read Schramm’s epic “Born American, but in the wrong place” essay, look it up immediately — but there are vastly more who just wanted a life of decency, safety, and dignity, not because they were raised to experience any of those things, but because they were human.
A nation grounded in a proposition about the basic nature of humanity was prepared to receive and educate them to that end, to the point that we ended up a country sustained by the descendants of tyranny, all the more determined thereby to defend liberty. If we aren’t that place any longer — and perhaps Europe, a land of blood and soil, never was — then let’s be honest about it. Yesterday, at Sunday School, I had the privilege of teaching among the students three young women, all sitting together as friends: one from Russia, one from Eritrea, and one from Lebanon. One could hardly imagine national origins more steeped in autocracy, repression, and violence, yet here they are, fully American and consciously appreciative of it — explicitly because of those origins.
That’s what America does. If that’s no longer what we wish to do — if we now fear them more than we believe in ourselves — then let’s at least conduct the conversation with that honesty, rather than cloaking our un-confidence in the pretense of superiority.
I agree. This small number of refugees — who have certainly been better vetted than most immigrants — are not apt to hurt us. If we fear these refugees more than we believe in ourselves, however — and it seems that we do — then keeping them out will in no way fix the problem. It will only serve to mask a problem that is vastly more serious. And that problem is that we no longer believe in ourselves.
This past week has prompted a deep crisis in confidence in me, certainly. Until now, I would have placed myself solidly in the camp of American conservatives. I cannot imagine pulling the lever for Hillary Clinton; but I’m suddenly forced to imagine sitting this one out. It is tragic, but I can’t imagine voting for politicians so defeatist about America, so crushed by this past decade, that they think five-year-old Syrian orphans pose a serious threat to the greatest and most benevolent superpower history has known — a country that invented the modern world, put a man on the moon, is exploring Mars, has the world’s freest press, that invented the Internet, conquered epidemic disease, destroyed the Nazis, defeated Imperial Japan, sent the Soviet Empire to the ash heap of history, and is still the source of 90 percent of the world’s real creativity — and still represents a dream of redemption for so many countless people on this suffering planet. That defeatism, that fear, is not the America I knew growing up, and the willingness to luxuriate in that despair and defeatism — and use it for electoral advantage — sits poorly with me, a proud American. This is not the America that made us the greatest country the world has ever known, but a county like any other, and while I will always love it and be grateful to it; clearly something precious has been lost, and it is a terrible thing to see.
If excommunication from the conservative movement is the price I’ll pay for saying this, so be it. But here I stand. I can do no other.
Published in General
I live in Birmingham in the UK, a city of about 1 million with large contingents of Moslems (mostly from Bangladesh and Pakistan, but with increasing numbers of Somalis), Hindus, Chinese. Moslems tend not to integrate but live-in self-created ghettos, in houses into which they were not placed by local authorities, but which they bought. Schools in such places, like Small Heath, and adjoining Sparkhill, tend to be about 90% Moslem. The children walking in the streets use the dialect that their parents use. When seen in groups in the city centre they tend to be with other Moslems rather than in mixed groups – unsurprising as most people make friends from their near neighbours or from people they meet in school. Their social structures reproduce those of the subcontinent rather than United Kingdom (including the tendency for first cousin marriage and an almost Old Testament patriarchy where late middle-aged sons obey their octogenarian fathers) and reflect the, probably, inevitable tendency of migrants to reproduce “home” when enough of them are gathered together in one place. This is not necessarily a criticism, although I do not think it is sensible, it appears to be a natural human tendency. I do not know if things are different in America, but then I do not know whether you have sufficient numbers of Moslem immigrants from the same geographical locality to create their own ghettos. This process occurs not from exclusion by Europeans, but the reproduction of a clan system.
Why would you consider this? Have you ever raised a child? I know Claire has not.
It’s hard enough to inculcate our values in the children we raise from infancy. I know that there are a number of parents here on Ricochet who have failed in the attempt. Even assuming that we would be allowed to adopt any of these children and raise them in our families (adoption being not allowed in Islam), it would be even harder if we brought home older children. I have friends who adopted a Russian child at 1 1/2 years of age; 14 years later that child is a ticking time bomb.
You talk as if the Americans arguing against trusting corrupt authorities to weed out jihadists are blind to the fundamental problem of our nation’s flailing cultural confidence. Have you not been reading Ricochet for the past 5 years?
This is how debates work. We move from the general to the particular and back to the general, ad infinitum. The present focus on this particular refugee proposal does not constitute myopia.
That we have bigger concerns does not mean this minor concern should be a shoe-in. Why add to our troubles? It’s like you’re saying if our huge national debt is such a problem, we might as well add to the debt while we figure out how to pay it off.
Don’t be melodramatic. You’re viewing this issue in isolation. Wait a couple weeks for the conversation to shift and the big picture to reemerge.
And Ricochet! This is what makes America great, and you are part of that:
I don’t really have anything to add to my previous remarks, though since few seem to have seen them, I don’t feel bad about linking them here.
This portion of the discussion reminds me of something Kevin Williamson used to say about same-sex marriage: “Marriage has a bullet wound to the head and we’re arguing about a swollen appendix.”
I never understood why he thought this argument was persuasive. First, the fact that we’re arguing over the swollen appendix is part and parcel of the complaint that no one is serious about the bullet wound to the head. Second, even if we miraculously managed to focus our attention on repairing the bullet wound to the head, if the swollen appendix burst, it could still kill the patient on its own -how much more so in its weakened state!
So here. Yes, we have many, many problems. And we’re focusing on the swollen appendix again. Because we are a deeply unserious people. And yes, multiculturalism and the diversity politics of the United States represent a gut shot -a painful, but survivable wound. Unless we do something stupid to make it worse.
I’m not convinced 10,000 Syrian refugees, provided we break them up and spread them out, are going to make the problem appreciably worse. But if they did, I can fully understand not aggravating our condition.
Claire’s point is that the terrorists don’t have to immigrate to Europe; many of them are born in Muslim communities in Europe.
And then, for some reason, she wants us to bring more Muslims to this country so more can be born here as well.
By the way, I bought and read your book years ago. I’ve got the Thatcher book as well, though I haven’t prioritized it yet. Darn Ricochet gobbled up all my money on books those first couple years.
Stick with us, Claire. Never back off from a relationship because of just a few weeks of doubt. Every family has its ups and downs.
I understand your identity crisis, Claire. I think what some of the commenters here are missing is that American conservatism is a big-tent movement. That sort of fractional element is especially palpable now, with the internecine squabbling coming from the anti-establishment crowd.
I have conservative friends confident that it is America’s role to take in every last refugee. On the other hand, some are more restrictionist types—like many on Ricochet. I consider myself in the latter camp, but don’t see much of a problem taking in the very young and very old. But even then, I have my reservations — not because I feel that a small child is a genuine threat to national security, but that in order to ensure that the US is as safe as possible, if taking zero refugees is what it takes, then so be it.
I think the Right is good at fanning the flames of fear. But that can be a good thing. It’s why I don’t entrust the Left with measures of national security. But looking at Europe, we tend not to alienate immigrants; if anything, they alienate themselves in their refusal to assimilate and accept American values.
It is happening here, just not rapidly.
Nice to meet you, btw.
She joined her family in Paris. Perfectly respectable. I’d hate to be separated from my family as well.
Great post about the immigrant assimilation despite dismissing genuine, actual, serious security concerns.
Shouldn’t it give us pause that the same ideological faction which strips America of her confidence also demands we accept the refugees without question? Their idea of immigration is an implied form of penance for Western societies sins. America is somehow culpable for everything from the Crusades to colonization to the apartheid, and we need people who “don’t look like us” to heal our broken soul.
I agree that American tradition is very different from the European. I love that we are an alloy of cultures forged with common principles. But too many that guide our public policy right now believe that a melting pot is just another would for cultural imperialism (which is double-plus bad).
In short: I don’t trust the current administration to even attempt to guide assimilation in the spirit of your post.
From what I glean, Claire has spent very little of her adult life in this country, and not for reasons of her family. In all the time I’ve been coming to this site, I’ve never gotten the sense that she really understands American conservatives or America in general, that is, the real America vs. some academic notion of what she thinks America should be.
I have read her holding forth on many issues of internal domestic politics, including issues of law enforcement and social policy, and I consistently find her takes either misinformed, naive, elitist, unrealistic, tone deaf or some combination thereof. Her utter shock at the reaction her snarky rebuke of US governors provoked exemplifies this perfectly.
Claire doesn’t understand American conservatives and I find her finger wagging and laments about the state of a country where she hasn’t “had skin in the game” for decades tiresome.
comment 42: “Claire doesn’t understand American conservatives and I find her finger wagging and laments about the state of a country where she hasn’t “had skin in the game” for decades tiresome.”
The value of sending American journalists out into the wider world is that they can tell us what they see and we will know that their perspective is the same as ours.
All journalists spend most of their time abroad.
If we had listened to more of our foreign correspondents over the last few years, we wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with.
Um, why would I believe that any journalist has the same perspective as me? I don’t think the journalists who stay in this country have the same perspective as me, let alone one who hasn’t actually been educated in this country or lived here for decades.
What prescient advice did we miss from the sagacious and brave insiders embedded abroad, sacrificing for us to give us their reliable perspective?
I know some adopted kids that are a joy and credit to their (adoptive) parents, and some that seemed to be ‘bad seeds’. Its a gamble to be sure.
My real point is: we’re not against helping orphans, and she’s not really advocating that we take in orphans. She’s employing a hyper emotional argument to say we’re morally defective if we don’t agree to open our doors to Syrian refugees in general to come and live here. I want to call her bluff.
I mean as opposed to a French journalist reporting on France.
I’ve been reading about the Muslim crisis in Europe for years. This is not a surprise. We should have had this national debate on immigration of Muslims ten years ago.
I’m not afraid of immigrants, I’m afraid of American leftists who actively seek to prevent immigrants from assimilating into American culture.
Hell, a lot of them seem to actively seek to prevent Americans from assimilating into American culture.
Well, if Claire wants to keep the topic to what’s happening in France or Turkey or Asia, or wherever her current beat is, I’m all ears. When she starts lecturing me about what’s going on in this country, I don’t really understand why I should listen. That is my point.
It has. We do.
But I’ve been chanting that for a while now.
People don’t focus on problems until they become immanent. That is human nature, not to mention we’ve had myriad other more pressing issues to deal with here that already don’t receive enough attention. I think this debate going on now is perfectly timely, muslim immigration will be with us from here on out. We have plenty of time to have this argument still.
I hope you are right. To me, it feels like it’s too little too late.
It’s a huge problem. The United States takes great pride in not discriminating against people based on their religion or ethnicity. Yet here we are, wondering if we need to do so, if one of our pillars is made of salt.
I see compelling arguments on both sides. There’s Dearborn, Michigan, but there are also thousands of Muslims living throughout the country who respect what America is all about.
It is a difficult issue. I do not want sensationalism to guide public policy.
To me, the Muslims are addicted to their supremacist thinking. Like drug addicts, they will not change unless they have to for some reason. It seems to me that this is a good time to say, “Hey, you’ve hit rock bottom. You’re homeless and broke. We will help you but only if you change your behavior.”
Claire,
The problem is NOT that we no longer believe in ourselves. The problem is we don’t believe in the competency of our government as run by the current administration. And we have many, many good reasons to be very, very suspicious.
Unlike you, I have no confidence in our current government’s ability to vet these refugees. None whatsoever. Where is the independent data on them going to come from? Syria? We’ll have essentially nothing to go on but interviews, during which terrorists will obviously lie. We’ll have to accept the lies for lack of other available information.
Even if only one terrorist gets in out of 10,000 refugees, that’s possibly many American lives that will be extinguished or harmed forever. France obviously couldn’t vet the refugees properly. What makes anyone believe that we can?
Interestingly enough, the Left is at least aware of America’s relative national supremacy by their willingness to accept thousands of refugees. It’s odd.
It’s because, for the left, everything that’s wrong with the world is the white man’s fault.
Oh, got it. Sorry I missed your tone. And of course I am as pro-adoption as a person can get. But the whole thing does raise the question of why anyone would think that we could manage this problem just by taking in young ones.
There is simply no way for the West to assimilate those who adhere to a creed calling for the West’s destruction.
I’ve decided not to join the anti-Claire movement. She’s made so many points, and they’ve been rebutted fairly or unfairly that I don’t wish to repeat what has already been covered. The only thing that jumped out for me was her claim that the refugees are being vetted to death. Up till now I’d been brain-washed by Republican propaganda that without a DATA BASE it’s impossible to know who’s who. What data base? There are no data bases in the middle east worth relying on. So throw that piece of politics out.
Let me try to approach from a different angle. I’m active in something called the Lawfare Project. Google Brook Goldstein. The organization opposes pseudo legal activities engaged in by Muslim leadership like CAIR. They use our liberal legal system to attack what they call bigotry (Islamophobia) for the purpose of undermining American culture in favor of Sharia law. The courts are used to bring frivolous lawsuits. These suits are ultimately dismissed, but not before a defendant has been forced to spend considerable amounts of money. Additionally, they boycott and demonstrate to bring about changes, like footbaths, that public facilities can’t resist. Speakers who differ are stampeded out of colleges.
It’s not only about the hidden Jihadist. These refugees will likely follow the leader. 10,ooo is for openers. More will be admitted, and those already here will sponsor any number of relatives.
As a sort of atonement for the sins of the West, accepting refugees is a demented, off-base way of meting out justice. But I dare evoke a word wrapped up in swirling vagaries as “justice.”