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.

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  1. Scott Wilmot Member
    Scott Wilmot
    @ScottWilmot

    Claire Berlinski, Ed.: And that problem is that we no longer believe in ourselves

    I find that preposterous. I think most people on this site believe in the America founded on Judeo-Christian principles.

    We just don’t want it to become this or this

    It is exactly politicians like Hillary and Obama who are defeatists on America. The Republicans see the greatness we were and want it restored.

    • #1
  2. Manny Coolidge
    Manny
    @Manny

    OK, Europe made a mistake in immigrating Muslims.  So why do they continue this insanity?  And you’re unconvincing to American Muslim immigration.  The reason we have not had the same issues as Europe is because our Muslim immigration is substantially lower.  Given altering demographics, the logical expectation should be that we will experience the same problems.  Muslims have had every opportunity to assimilate in Europe.  They chose not to because their numbers justified keeping their cultural identity.  It had very little to do with European laws and practices.  I believe that is a misnomer.

    And no one wants to excommunicate you…LOL.

    • #2
  3. genferei Member
    genferei
    @genferei

    Here’s an interesting discussion larded with statistics (and links to statistics) that covers this very issue.

    • #3
  4. American Abroad Thatcher
    American Abroad
    @AmericanAbroad

    It is in the spirit of American optimism and American exceptionalism to believe that America has the vibrancy and attraction to make the melting pot a reality.  Trevino’s post is inspiring in that regard.

    However, considering that American optimism and exceptionalism are already under attack by the left, it seems unlikely that this plan for assimilation will work out.

    We now seem to relish victim status.  Even those at the most prestigious universities have nothing but contempt for the American ideal.  When reading books by white men is oppression and grounds for grievance, it is hard to imagine how the local pork butcher and barkeep will be able to survive in communities subject to large-scale Muslim immigration like Dearborn.  I wish this were not the case.

    • #4
  5. I Walton Member
    I Walton
    @IWalton

    Past immigrant waves took place when there was no welfare; people adjusted, temporarily depended on family or churches then adjusted, or returned.   There was no centralized administrative  state requiring a minimum of consensus to function.  It was effortless to begin a business, or hire someone at any wage.  No major party  sought to weaken traditional values, sew division, class, ethnic, or racial hatred in order to weaken resistance to the administrative state, the new progressive religion.  Immigrants  were overwhelmingly either Jews, Christians or from countries and regions where those religions and their cultures dominated.  They did not believe in Sharia law and came quickly to believe in the rule of secular law.  Sharia is not compatible with our liberal secular system and believing Muslims do not seem to abandon Sharia and all it represents.  What are the parallels and what interests are served?

    • #5
  6. BrentB67 Inactive
    BrentB67
    @BrentB67

    Regarding the US having more problems than admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees – indeed. We have 99 problems and don’t need 100.

    • #6
  7. She Member
    She
    @She

    Claire Berlinski: But most important distinction is something hardest to quantify: Immigrants to America have always wanted to become American.

    Because they wanted to, even before they got here.  They weren’t trawled by the thousands, rounded up in seine nets and dragged over here willy-nilly, after some more-or-less complete inspection process in which a number of the fish were thrown back.

    OK, that’s an exaggeration.

    But don’t you think there’s a difference between the immigrants who came to America, often suffering appalling privation even on the journey to get here, because they had a ‘dream’ of becoming American and making something of themselves (Mr She’s grandparents fall into this category), and those who find themselves here because, to paraphrase Robert Frost, “when you have to go there, they have to take you in?”

    At a time when we still can’t assimilate large numbers of native-born Americans who happen to be of different skin colors, and we seem to have lost the ability to assimilate huge slices of native-born young people (check the colleges and universities) of whatever color, and we’re in the midst of a heated argument about what to do with the millions and millions of people who came here illegally through a porous land border (presumably because they did, actively, want to be here, but unlike Mr She’s grandparents they flouted the law to do so), and when it’s quite easy to point to enclaves of unassimilated Muslims in towns in Michigan and parts of some other states that are becoming virtual no-go zones, it doesn’t seem overreactive, or unreasonable, to ask for a time-out on, and more discussion of, this issue without facing the accusation that we’re somehow scaredy-cats who are afraid of little children.

    After all, every terrorist was some mother’s little darling at one point.

    And while it’s probably not healthy to obsess too long in that vein, as BDB is fond of saying, refute that.

    • #7
  8. OmegaPaladin Moderator
    OmegaPaladin
    @OmegaPaladin

    We are not allowed to mandate assimilation.  A good portion of our political class hates our culture and wants to import voters that agree with them.  They treat ISIS like their dominatrix.

    If we can throw a democratic politician or whiny college student into Syria for every refugee we take, then sure.

    • #8
  9. Instugator Thatcher
    Instugator
    @Instugator

    Hi Claire, got the book on Audible yesterday.

    You assert that the problem is harming Europe and because of Europe’s dysfunction it is America’s problem too.

    Europe has already infected the US with its virulent “multiculturalism” and we are trying to shake it off (the campus protests of the last few months, plus the unraveling of the clock-boy story are helping.)

    Thing is – according to your book – this is America’s problem in much the same way that an abused spouse has a problem. Unfortunately your prescription is for the US to engage with Europe and help them – whereas anyone sane would tell an abused spouse to do the opposite.

    America needs to solve this problem by allowing Europe to learn the harsh lessons of multiculturalism. They can support these refugees and need to replace their own population. Let them learn how to assimilate the hard way, by actually doing it.

    The refugees you keep referring to are not in immediate danger, particularly if they have been working through the 2 year process needed to come here.

    Oh, and please stop with the 5 year old strawman, it is beneath you.

    • #9
  10. Lucy Pevensie Inactive
    Lucy Pevensie
    @LucyPevensie

    Claire, I see two points where your argument loses its logic.

    First, you point out several reasons why Muslim immigration to America has historically been more successful than immigration to Europe. These include: 1) We have had a higher socioeconomic class of immigrants; 2) we have not placed the immigrants in isolated ghettoes; and 3) immigrants to the US have historically really wanted to become American.  Do you imagine that any of these conditions would be true of the 10,000 Syrian refugees?  (I would point out to you the Somali refugee neighborhoods in Minneapolis as a counter-example to your reason #2.)

    Second, you keep harping on the 5-year-old as not being a risk.  Why is a 5-year-old not a risk?  Won’t the 5-year-old become a 15-year-old, and then a 20-year-old some day?  And then there’s this.

    • #10
  11. Bill Walsh Inactive
    Bill Walsh
    @BillWalsh

    That defeatism is not the America you knew growing up? You don’t remember the Carter Administration? Gas lines, “irrational fear of Communism,” stagflation forever, Cubans in Angola, Russians in Afghanistan, Iranian hostage crisis. There was a profoundly defeatist mood. And it largely turned around because of Reagan, whom you’ll recall, was an idiot second-rate actor fit only to swap dialogue with a chimp, a dangerous warmonger who would incinerate the globe, and a dopey, Pollyannaish naïf who was recycling bromides from the 1950s like he was peddling Arrow shirts and Lux.

    Turns out, though, the dope was a visionary who implemented a paradigm shift in American culture, economics, and foreign policy. For which he’s never been forgiven by the more conventional analysts who, as above, were operating on the principle of continuity in analysis. Reagan said, “Things don’t have to be this way, they can be better,” and argue about the details, the subsequent couple decades bore him out.

    So, without simply ascribing things to the Great Men theory of history, part of the problem is that, aside from rhetorically invoking Reagan, there’s just no Reagan. Most GOP pols don’t have a convincing argument from discontinuity. There’s no reason, e.g., that Rick Perry couldn’t have made his record in Texas a visionary argument for American economic revival and claim that would be the first step in reclaiming cultural health and restoring a Pac Americana. There’s no reason that Scott Walker couldn’t have pointed to his record in Wisconsin and said, we need to destroy antiquated, sclerotic institutions of government in order to clear the way for a freer society and smaller, more modern and effective governance in tune with the Constitution rather than 1930s statism, and here’s what that will look like. Etc.

    Trump, that short-fingered vulgarian, has one end of the stick with his empty “Make America Great Again” slogan. Ok, that’s the goal. But you need some convincing plan to get there, and even if building a wall were a convincing Step One, he’s shown not the slightest thought as to Step Two nor the principles by which to proceed or what American greatness might even mean.

    The main difference between now and the ’70s, from my perspective, aside from the lack of the Cold War to focus one’s attention like the prospect of a hanging, is that we’ve eaten a lot of our cultural seed corn, and that most of our organs of culture and half our political class subscribe implicitly to a soft form of the anti-Occidentalism Claire invokes above. Higher education has largely been converted into seminaries for vulgar Marxism, with meditations upon literature and history confined to Gnostic quests for the evil demiurge, Racegenderclass, and all his pomps and works, yea, unto the microaggession. So the most schooled are less attuned to reality, and their less bookish fellow citizens over in Fishtown are becoming more lumpen through the collapse of supportive religious and family structures largely due to the sexual revolutions aristocratic ideology’s filtering down, and through the ongoing contraction of less-skilled labor (and the Eloi’s preference for cheaper, foreign Morlocks’ mowing their lawns).

    So we are in a funk, and the only vox clamantis in our deserto is just making dumb charts in service of superficially clever counterintuitions. A Reagan—or even a Bill Clinton with his sunny roguishness—is not on offer this time around, it seems. Let me suggest that, short of some really unqualified person getting the nomination (and they’re out there), even the usual swing voter’s thumbless wisdom of simply voting in the out party as a corrective to the excesses of the in party is preferable to sitting it out in despair.

    Though, boy, it’s tempting. Tending one’s own garden has rarely looked so seductive…

    • #11
  12. Pelayo Inactive
    Pelayo
    @Pelayo

    Multiculturalism has weakened the West and that includes the United States.  How can we assimilate Muslim refugees who share some very different values from our Judeo-Christian roots if many Liberals believe that our Judeo-Christian roots are no better than any other culture or religion?

    As much as Trump and his supporters like to complain about Mexican immigrants, they are much easier to assimilate than Muslim refugees.  Mexicans are mostly Catholic and they are not known to join terrorist groups intent on destroying America.  The same can be said for immigrants from other Latin American and Caribbean nations.

    There is no denying the history of Islam and its spread through conquest and brutality.  The Crusades were a reaction to the threat of Islam in Europe, despite what idiots like Obama might say about them.

    • #12
  13. LilyBart Inactive
    LilyBart
    @LilyBart

    …..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…..

    I propose that we take all Syrian orphans up to, say, age 12.

    We can minister to older teenagers and grown ups in camps nearby their homeland until we can stabilize the situation.

    Would this satisfy Claire?

    • #13
  14. Manny Coolidge
    Manny
    @Manny

    She:

    Claire Berlinski: But most important distinction is something hardest to quantify: Immigrants to America have always wanted to become American.

    Because they wanted to, even before they got here. They weren’t trawled by the thousands, rounded up in seine nets and dragged over here willy-nilly, after some more-or-less complete inspection process in which a number of the fish were thrown back.

    OK, that’s an exaggeration.

    But don’t you think there’s a difference between the immigrants who came to America, often suffering appalling privation even on the journey to get here, because they had a ‘dream’ of becoming American and making something of themselves (Mr She’s grandparents fall into this category), and those who find themselves here because, to paraphrase Robert Frost, “when you have to go there, they have to take you in?”

    Actually most Europeans didn’t really want to assimilate either.  Or they wanted to assimilate on their own terms.  Which as OK, given we were in essence a European country and the difference wasn’t great. Even then it took generations for Europeans to assimilate.  Just look at how hard it was and perhaps still is for Native American Indians to assimilate.  And they didn’t want to assimilate either.  Huge cultural differences make assimilation difficult and causes problems.  We don’t need the Islamic problems.

    • #14
  15. Misthiocracy Member
    Misthiocracy
    @Misthiocracy

    Belgium was already a divided country, between Flemish and Walloon. How can the Belgians tell immigrants to assimilate when they can’t give immigrants a clear understanding of which nation they’re supposed to assimilate into?

    • #15
  16. Judithann Campbell Member
    Judithann Campbell
    @

    Claire, you seem to put putting all of the blame for Muslim non integration in Europe on Europe. Are Muslim immigrants ever in any way responsible for their refusal to integrate? You put too much blame on Europe and give too much credit to America; there is no question that it’s better to be an immigrant in America than in Europe, but American immigrants themselves deserve a great deal of the credit for assimilating. You seem to assume that if an immigrant refuses to assimilate, it must be the fault of the country they emigrated to. That is not the case.

    • #16
  17. genferei Member
    genferei
    @genferei

    Misthiocracy: Belgium was already a divided country, between Flemish and Walloon. How can the Belgians tell immigrants to assimilate when they can’t give immigrants a clear understanding of which nation they’re supposed to assimilate into?

    Indeed. Are the immigrants to assimilate into the Black Lives Matter movement, the Mexican-flag-waving elements of La Raza, or the Mennonites?

    • #17
  18. LilyBart Inactive
    LilyBart
    @LilyBart

    I think Claire is a lovely woman.  But she demonstrates a high level of idealistic nativity here.

    I see 3 basic problems (threats):

    1: The immediate problem of importing terrorists with the group.  They’ve SAID they would use this ‘path’ to get here, and Heaven help me, I BELIEVE them.   And it doesn’t take many to cause great suffering death, as they’ve already proven.

    2.  Financial:  We’re already $20 trillion in debt.   Adding more to our welfare rolls (the stats show that they tend to use welfare in high numbers)  Essentially, many will become our ‘wards’ – and many of their kids will after them.  We can minister to them in camps near their homes until  the situation stabilizes.   It has the advantage of leaving them in their homelands where they are more comfortable.  We need to help them, but we don’t have to make them Americans.  That’s just ridiculous!

    3.  Long Term – any student of history knows that when a critical mass of new people move into another area, the culture of that area changes.  We are importing people whose values and culture are antithetical to our own.   I think Claire is overly optimistic and naive about their willingness to assimilate.  It WILL and HAS  caused problems.  They haven’t assimilated well in Europe.   Already prior refugees and immigrates from strongly Muslim countries are demanding we change to accommodate them.   I’ts  going to be a problem -count on it.

    • #18
  19. She Member
    She
    @She

    Manny:

    Actually most Europeans didn’t really want to assimilate either. Or they wanted to assimilate on their own terms. Which as OK, given we were in essence a European country and the difference was great. It took generations for Europeans to assimilate. Just look at how hard it was and perhaps still is for Native American Indians to assimilate. And they didn’t want to assimilate either. Huge cultural differences make assimilation difficult and causes problems. We don’t need the Islamic problems.

    What do you mean, ‘on their own terms?’  They insisted on the right to stink up the neighborhood with the awful smell of Cabbage Soup, cooking, for about three days on the back burner of the coal stove?  Or that they insisted that the American flag was offensive and must not be flown at their childrens’ school?  There are degrees of difference to ‘on their own terms.’

    Most of the Europeans who emigrated to the United States, and who I’m familiar with (most of them, Eastern Europeans), discouraged the speaking of their native languages by their children, in order to better blend in with the culture.  (I think that’s a very common story).  Most couldn’t wait to be naturalized.  And they were fully assimilated in a generation or two.  That’s not very long.

    I think you are essentially agreeing with my point, though.  It is challenging to assimilate even those with whom we share some history and cultural identity.  That is made exponentially more difficult as the gap between cultures widens, especially absent the desire on the ‘assimilatees’ part to blend in.  Thus far, wherever they end up, Muslims as a group (I’m not talking about specific individuals) have shown themselves to be less than adept at doing so.

    However, my fundamental objection to this manufactured crisis (and I am using that phrase in the way that I would use it to describe most of the ‘famine’ crises in Africa–the ‘Act of God’ component (true drought, crop failure and so on) pales into insignificance next to the misery caused by the basket-case, tin-pot, rulers and their shenanigans) is not even terror based.

    It’s that we (the West) are essentially saying:  OK, ISIS.  You now own large parts of Iraq and Syria.  There’s your Caliphate.  We don’t really see that changing, nor do we see the locals summoning the will or the organization or the ability to kick you out, so I guess we pretty much have to cede the territorial integrity of that area to you.  Congratulations.  You’re well on your way to becoming a country.  Next stop, United Nations.  Therefore, we guess we’ve got to do something with all these people who are on the run, because, Lord knows, they can’t go home again.  And no one in the Middle East wants anything to do with them.

    If that’s the best we can do for foreign policy, shame on us.

    • #19
  20. Pseudodionysius Inactive
    Pseudodionysius
    @Pseudodionysius

    France beheaded their future in the French Revolution, literally:

    In mid-July, 1794, in the closing days of Robespierre s Directoire, sixteen Carmelite nuns were guillotined at the Barrière de Vincennes in Paris, convicted of crimes against the state. They were buried in a common grave in a makeshift cemetery, where a single cross today marks the remains of 1,306 victims of the guillotine.1 They were a mere handful of the Revolution s victims; they should have earned at most a footnote in history books. Instead, they have commanded the attention of historians, hagiographers, authors, playwrights, composers, and librettists for two hundred years. In our century the Martyrs of Compiègne have been the subject of at least one massive scholarly history, a German novella, a French play, a film, and an opera. In 1902, Pope Leo XIII declared the nuns Venerable, the first step toward canonization. They were later beatified by Pius X in May, 1906: Carmelites celebrate the memory of the prioress, Blessed Teresa of St. Augustine (Lidoine), and her fifteen companions on July 17, and Catholics may adopt them as patrons. As the bicentenary of their death is observed, many are petitioning for their canonization.

    • #20
  21. James Gawron Inactive
    James Gawron
    @JamesGawron

    Dr. Berlinski,

    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…

    Claire, I think it is time for some tough love and a serious intervention here. First, this is the most grotesque and insulting strawman yet as the defeatists are obviously Hillary & Barack. I haven’t heard of a single comment that reflects fear of 5-year-old children coming from the right. Rubio just said let in the very old and the very young. Obviously, the concern is about the adolescent to young adult radicalized Muslims like the ones that just killed 100+ people in Paris, the murders in Mali, and the 18 that were apprehended in Brussels before they could do the same deed.

    There have been 3 million Syrian refugees in Turkey for quite some time. Surely, there has been many hundreds of thousands of 5-year-old children there. Yet, suddenly out of the blue we must instantly accept all Syrian refugees without much assurance that they are not already radicalized and well trained. In fact, we aren’t allowed to make sure that they actually are Syrian.

    Claire, I think that you have not come to terms with what it is to be a post-holocaust Jew. Let me recount a little story that perhaps will help you.

    Cont.

    • #21
  22. James Gawron Inactive
    James Gawron
    @JamesGawron

    Cont. from #21

    Before Einstein, Max Planck won the Nobel Prize for his creation of Quantum Physics. He was appointed the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. The Princeton Advanced Research Institute was later modeled after Kaiser Wilhelm. Planck knew of Einstein’s quest for the full theory The General Theory of Relativity. He brought Einstein to Kaiser Wilhelm so that he could concentrate on this and nothing else. It was successful. Planck and his wife were gregarious and entertained making all feel welcome in their home. He was much loved and was loved and respected by Einstein.

    When Hitler came to power his insane eugenic-based policies were well known. Still people couldn’t believe that he was really serious. They threatened Einstein immediately. Planck in 1933 went for a meeting with Hilter. He was sure he could make Hitler see reason. One-third of the Nobel Prize winners in the world were Jewish and German. Surely Hitler would not want to lose such a valuable resource. At the meeting, he confronted Hitler with this fact and the possibility of losing Einstein. Hitler was reported to have said in response:

    “Then we will do without Physics.”

    Einstein immediately was forced to leave Germany to save his own life. Planck came back from the meeting a changed man. He realized Hitler was most certainly serious and completely insane. Planck had four children, two daughters and two sons. Both daughters died in childbirth. The first son died fighting in WWI. His only remaining child participated in Valkyrie the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler. Planck’s son was captured and in true diabolical fashion Hitler ordered Planck to witness the gruesome execution of his last remaining child.

    Incredibly Planck, though in his 80s, survived this and the War. Before he died they renamed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute the Max Planck Institute.

    Sometimes it is difficult to separate the evil from the good. However, we must not gloss over this task. We must make every effort. When we find evil we must combat it with everything in our power. When we find good we must give credit where credit is due.

    Regards,

    Jim

    • #22
  23. David Foster Member
    David Foster
    @DavidFoster

    An important post, which I want to come back and read in more depth.  But for now:

    “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.”

    Which raises the question:  how hard is it to *get* a European passport, if one is an immigrant or refugee?  The current refugee crisis aside, what is involved in immigrating to an EU country?

    • #23
  24. TG Thatcher
    TG
    @TG

    If I understand the thrust of your argument, here, Claire …

    You’re challenging us (the Ricochetti) to prove that we are confident, by bringing in the “10,000 Syrian refugees?”

    You’re double-dog-daring us? (humor)

    Again (you may have missed it), I’m one who believes there is a very low probability that Daesh has embedded terrorists into the pool of potential Syrian refugee immigrants to the US.  I do, however, believe that the US currently is weak on the ability to assimilate newcomers (as others have pointed out, using the example of the crybullies recently attracting attention on a number of US university campuses).  From where I sit, it appears less that the Ricochetti have no confidence in the civilization that we all want to preserve, and more that we recognize that we (our “tribe”) are not merely hampered in our efforts to promote what we want to conserve and pass on, but that we are actively being fought, and it appears to be a nearly even fight.

    I cannot dismiss the arguments of the Ricochetti who are saying “no.”

    • #24
  25. Aaron Miller Inactive
    Aaron Miller
    @AaronMiller

    Claire Berlinski, Ed.: if so, I submit, we have much bigger problems than the admission of 10,000 Syrian refugees.

    Of course we do. There’s so much talk about that admission because it is the political focus of the moment, but it is just one more avoidable mistake tossed onto the pile.

    Claire Berlinski, Ed.: 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.

    I did some research into Harris County (Houston) demographics yesterday. The largest religious belief group is Unclaimed (mostly agnostic or atheist) and the second largest is nondenominational Christianity (a vague spiritualism). Christianity is withering in America, too… largely thanks to modern interpretations that have deprived it of all seriousness and distinction. More orthodox denominations are growing, but not fast enough to compensate for the rise of unbelief.

    Claire Berlinski, Ed.: Societies with large cohorts of frustrated, hopeless, unemployed young men find their immune systems compromised when diseases of the soul are at large.

    In northern Houston suburbs, Muslims mix with Christians and agnostics, so they tend to be secular and assimilate. But that secularity means their young adults are plagued by the same ennui and unmeaningful lives as their Christian and agnostic counterparts.

    The bored look for drama. For young Muslims, the most fitting drama might be jihad.

    • #25
  26. Front Seat Cat Member
    Front Seat Cat
    @FrontSeatCat

    Claire,

    Your book still rings true today – all of it. The immigration part, but also the loss of faith, no one having children, the rise of Nazism, the green movements. They are all part of the same big picture, and you described them well. I truly believe that it is a battle between good and evil – you cannot explain that simply in political posts and be done.

    When we remove the safety nets that God intended for our lives to work well, the voids are filled with confusion, apathy, sadness, violence, hate – all variations of evil. The ability of overcome evil had to come from a place bigger than ourselves – to be willing to give our lives to defeat the monsters that were spreading destruction all across Europe. It’s no different now. No one is saying send back the 5 year old. The little boy that washed up on the beach in Turkey was heartbreaking. Our hearts are not stone. There is a compromise.

    As a conservative, I hate guns. I believe in doing my part to keep the planet clean. We’re all variations of pieces of personal belief.

    You may be having a crisis of faith.  In times of crisis, your dad’s health, blood on the street close to home, this becomes apparent. Go with it. You are not alone there. You emerge stronger and better, but still you. I recommend your book to everyone. The world is at a crossroads. We’re in it together.

    • #26
  27. Aaron Miller Inactive
    Aaron Miller
    @AaronMiller

    Claire Berlinski, Ed.: 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.

    Have you also considered the commonality of suburbia in America? The Northeast is more like Europe, but as you travel west in America everything is more spread out and less coordinated.

    Outside the inner districts of a metropolis, you are less likely to encounter predators like Al Sharpton and Sheila Jackson Lee who stoke racial tensions for political gain. Even in the suburbs, people often settle in areas with like-minded neighbors, resulting in a Vietnamese area, a Mexican area, and so on. But there is less political competition between subcultures and more friendly integration.

    In any case, shouldn’t we be surprised if such a geographically large country of 315+ million residents experienced conflicts of culture in the same ways as a small nation with 20 million people? Scale doesn’t change everything, but it changes a lot.

    Anyway, notice that President Obama and other Democrats have argued for increased urbanization. They hate suburbs and want to force people into the cities.

    • #27
  28. Dean Murphy Member
    Dean Murphy
    @DeanMurphy

    Europe’s inability to make Europeans out of Muslim immigrants was a symptom of a wider problem

    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

    Europe’s inability to make Europeans out of *most* immigrants contributes to their problem.

    Muslim immigrants refusing to assimilate into western culture is the problem in the US.  We continue to be the most hospitable country on earth to those who wish to become american.

    5 year old Syrian orphans are not the problem.  If they were the refugees being transported here, I would be on the tarmac welcoming them off the planes.

    It’s the young radical men that I’m concerned about.

    • #28
  29. BThompson Inactive
    BThompson
    @BThompson

    Go ahead an sit it out, Claire. You don’t care to live in this country, so why should you be taken seriously as to how we are governed or even exercise the right to influence how we are governed?

    • #29
  30. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    Claire Berlinski, Ed.: 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.

    You just ruined my day.

    • #30
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