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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
To the Obama administration, I believe this is a feature, not a bug.
Claire should not be the one trying to convince America or Ricochet readers to accept Syrian refugees. It should be Obama. I do not get my country’s pertinent information from Facebook or any other social media. I would appreciate if he would do what every president before him has done, when our country is faced with multiple serious issues.
“We interrupt your regularly scheduled program to bring you a message….” etc. Obama needs to make the case to the American people via TV and radio, not tweets and five minute rose garden moments.
I want to know why we should accept more refugees, what is really the progress in the Middle East, Syria, and with our allies including details.
I want to hear him say he has spoken to every governor and heard their concerns – each state has been taking refugees for a couple years. Not every state is the same in terms of resources.
I want to hear him say what procedures are in place to screen potential threats.
I want regular updates about our borders, funding to states to handle the loads, and I do not want to take to social media for this information. Many working people, the elderly etc have no time for social media or even have a computer. It should be a fireside chat where the family gathers and hears a confident message with truth – then we will think, talk, vote with information. We are not getting that, and we deserve it.
When we tell the orphans being brought here, what country are we going to tell them they are assimilating into?
This doesn’t just apply to the orphans under consideration: our school systems seem all to eager to wallow in our past mistakes, misjudgements, and hypocrisies.
Fine. Teach that. Roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything, but save a little space in the lesson plan for the triumphs, wisdom, and admirable stands on principle too. They are part of the story.
The average school child nowadays can tell you all about Washington owning slaves, or slaves only counting as three fifths of a person, but nothing else about the man who was rightly called the “father of his country” or that the three fifths compromise was due to the abolitionist faction at the Constitutional Convention not wanting to count slaves at all in an effort to limit the ability of the “slave power” to buy additional population to boost their congressional representation.
So no, I’m not particularly worried about this batch of refugees (although I maintain that the “vetting” being done will be a joke with no punchline). I am worried about kids who know nothing about what this country means.
I was in Fresh Market – a young lady was giving wine samples – the whole table was a new line of wines from Armenia – she said my friends and I could not even find it on a map – only thing we knew is the Kardashians are Armenian – pretty bad right? I said yes with a smile and bought the Pomegranate one called ReVah to share at Thanksgiving.
Maybe take a globe to dinner and play a “find that country” game or some rolled up speeches of our Founders tied with ribbon about the holiday itself and our country’s beginnings!
Well, I grant that she has spent a lot of time in Europe. She attended school at Oxford and lived in Turkey until recently, though I don’t know what she did in between and don’t care to investigate.
The elite university and pundit culture of ideas does seem evident at times. But Claire, Peter, and other Ricochet Contributors are admirably self-critical and often seek to identify their own biases. Obviously, her time in Turkey and her family history of Jewish persecution has made her more wary than most of criticisms of a religion and more interested in that region’s refugees particularly.
In any case, I don’t mind hearing from an honest, thorough, and generally reasonable person like Claire when her views fall more in line with DC insiders or the United Nations than with rural and suburban Americans.
I really meant on their own terms. I grew up in Brooklyn, NY the son of immigrants and we had lots of immigrants in the neighborhood. Yes there was pride in the US, but for first generation immigrants their heart was in their homeland. Most immigrants don’t come from countries where they were persecuted. Irish, Italian, hispanic, jews. They all kept their customs and culture as much as possible. Most did not convert to the default protestant religions. They kept their home religions. The very fact we have hyphenated Americans (Italian-Americans) shows it. We have our ethnic parades, and many did not force their children to speak English. They were forced in school. I know lots of Italians who root for Italy in the World Cup. All the ethnics I know root for their homeland in soccer. I also mentioned Native Americans. It’s clear they didn’t want to assimilate. If you were to move overseas for some reason out of your control I bet your heart would still be American. This assimilation is a bit romanticized.
And enough from the tone moaners. In the friendly neighborhood pickup basketball game that is Ricochet, what’s the occasional elbow to the head?
I don’t mind hearing opposing points of view per se. It’s the claims of others’ secret true motives by her about people who oppose the refugee plan that go too far. She tries to target her contempt for only the politicians, evidently thinking those of us who support the politicians won’t think she’s also talking about us. Maybe she thinks we’re too stupid to see that we’re being hoodwinked by those shrewd hate mongers and wants to give us a pass. Or maybe out of self-preservation for her position here or the site itself or both she doesn’t want to come right out and call the members of Ricochet the names she casually throws at the political leaders on the right. Who knows?
I also don’t care for the “I’m a victim” card she tries to play at the end of the post. There is no hierarchy of conservatives or inquisition chasing Claire, so the “excommunicated” bit and association of herself to Luther were just a bit nauseating.
In my opinion, Claire is the best thing about Ricochet. She, more than any one else, has set the tone and elevated the dialog since May 2010. Ricochet wasn’t worth bothering with during the time she was away and I didn’t.
Yay!!!!!!
So, as to the topic at hand, are people who oppose the refugee plan demagogues, racists, defeatists, fascists or simply un-American? Feel free to choose more than one, Claire was generous enough to give us lots of options. Her conscience dictated no less after all.
I love Claire’s work. I love hearing from someone with an academic background in our camp! The fact that she lives in Europe, where I’m assuming American conservatives are pilloried, is particularly valuable. It’s one thing to be critical, but another to get so downright personal.
Amen.
Edited to point out that I disagree completely with Claire on this issue. But I respect her and her views, and appreciate her input and tone in general. On the other hand, I am losing respect for the people on my side in this argument.
In Claire’s other post she claimed that Nigel Farange of UKIP and Marine le Pen of Le Front Nationale and the less seemly far right parties were in the thrall of an international satanic and Russian supremacist plot to undo Europe. So add satanic to that list.
I think it is quite possible that to have Norman Rockwell’s vision of participatory democracy, you also have to have Norman Rockwell America’s demographics. Which Claire wishes to (further) remove from us by mass immigration, of which the current refugee situation is just a drop in the bucket…
I want to be able to draw Mohamed’s picture and not feel a shred of fear in so doing. Ms. B, can you explain how your program advocating for our importing more Muslims contributes to freedom of expression? The video produced in another recent thread of American Muslims being interviewed about their attitudes towards matters in general clearly demonstrated how violent is the reaction of these so-called ‘fellow Americans’ to my exercising that prerogative.
Really want to know what you think about that prerogative.
Your tone, here, and in prior comments in this thread strike me as … unpleasant. This is an emotional topic but I think that you are stoking your own emotional response beyond any offense that Claire may have given. (Unless of course you are a Republican governor)
Exactly. What if the man started making a drawing of Mohamed- and the congregation was made up of Muslims? Do you think the looks on the faces would be as Rockwell depicted them?
Well, if excommunication from the Ricochet movement is the price I’ll pay for saying this, so be it. But here I stand. I can do no other.
Thank you. Birmingham is my hometown (I live in the States now). You’ve confirmed the impression that I’ve had, after several visits over the last ten or fifteen (or forty) years.
I think the impact of this isn’t fully understood in a country where there aren’t huge Muslim enclaves in a sizeable proportion of its major cities. A recent survey claimed that the Muslim population of Birmingham was a shade under 25%, or about 250,000. And Birmingham is not unique in the UK in this respect.
But his fellow Americans would castigate him royally for attempting to squelch our right to say what we think about anything.
We can’t make anyone shut up (just ask the moderators at New England’s town meetings! :) ), but we can all raise our voices in protests, we can vote, and we can dispute nonsense claims.
Claire’s point was that America is still a great country. I agree.
This.
I know a current resident there, about 10 years older than I am and a lifetime resident. This is an exactly accurate description of life there.
Just when I think there’s no hope left for humanity, along comes this.
#BrusselsLockdown.
For the record, this is the UK’s (left wing) Guardian newspaper on Nigel Farage and Vladimir Putin
I am not an unqualified admirer of Nigel Farage but there is a world of difference between Le Pen and Farage and even a newspaper not known as an admirer of Farage implicitly affirms that.
It is reasonable to accept risks in order to help people. As a Christian, I am called to extremes in that regard.
But a distinction must be made between personal charity and government programs. It is not reasonable to demand that my fellow voters accept the same degrees of risk I choose, nor demand that they prioritize all the same people in need that I would, nor demand that they extend that aid how and when I prefer.
Contrary to some libertarian expectations, the practical reality is that democratic nations do regularly aspire to cooperative reflection of individual charity. Since WWII, the US has acted as world policeman and often the world has been better for it. Americans have been charitable both as individuals and as citizens, and I am proud of that history.
But, however previous electorates might compare, Americans are now sharply divided into myriad interests and there is little faith in current political leadership to carry out our intentions in a responsible or even patriotic manner. We must inhale to exhale; must regain America’s exceptionality and clarity to again be that white knight. The aid we can offer foreigners is limited by conditions at home… including a frankly anti-American administration and a relativist culture in our schools.
Half of polled Ricochetti would conditionally accept Syrian refugees and many others support establishment of safe zones or other alternative aid. It’s not like most American conservatives are eager to slam the door.
I’m also kind of wondering why this particular dispute is what has made Claire see the light as to the change in America’s preciousness, when there are so many other more dramatic and obvious ones to point to, from a conservatives perspective anyway. Not to mention, suspicion of foreign enemies isn’t really a new thing in this country. It actually goes back to 1798 at least, just ask John Adams.
Compared to the Alien and Sedition acts or the Red Scare, I’d say opposition to Syrian refugees is small potatoes. While I don’t think this particular controversy is actually in the same vein as those parts of American history, I surmise Claire would. So, by that token she should probably see the relatively modest level of opposition when compared to those other precedents as a type of progress!
From today’s 3-Martini Lunch: Study shows 13 percent of Syrian refugees are ISIS sympathizers.
Tell me again why we should be bringing the Syrian refugees here?
Because if you don’t you hated Claire’s grandparents and wanted them to die in the Holocaust.
I’m not sure what you mean, but at least you replied. Claire stirs up disputation for sure. I think she does it on purpose. But your point can get lost in the deluge of comments. I’m going to take a PAUSE for a few months until she chills out. If she chills out. I ran out of words in my post, so I’ll close out here. I’m trying to get across that Legal Jihad can bring down a civilization over time. And Radical Islam has nothing but time. It’s a two pronged approach. The violent ones, smaller in number. And others who use the system against itself. Peaceful Muslims are more likely to support these fake charitable organizations that profess to represent the majority. Many of them are conduits channeling money to terrorists. It’s not so easy for the neighborhood guy to keep his hand in his pocket when asked to contribute, let alone oppose.
We have a growing immigration problem and refugees are just part of it. All these balkanized ethnic groups are constantly hammering away at society. Throw in pissed off white college kids and it a gimme revolution.
I take the Red Scare to mean the 1920’s period, not the 1950’s McCarthy/HUAC period. If so, the Red Scare makes the point.
There were an estimated 150,ooo active communists and anarchists (including real bomb-throwing, president-shooting anarchists) in the US, concentrated in the urban NE, almost completely from the millions of recent immigrants who had brought their class resentments with them from Italy, Ireland, the shtetl, etc. The left was on a roll with the Russian revolution. These immigrants were feared and despised except to the extent they could be exploited by big-city machines.
Lots of history ensued but when the smoke cleared in a generation or two, those immigrants were the grand-parents of US Presidents, movie studio heads, Governors, Wall Street moguls, and purveyors of some really great cuisine.
So yeah, 10,ooo Syrians is small potatoes.