The Backlash in Europe

 

A backlash against high levels of immigration is underway in Europe. Denmark now wants to send refugees from Syria back. If they cannot, they will round them up and put them in camps. Sweden wants to stop accepting refugees. Britain voted for Brexit to cut the flow of immigration, and is now sending refugees to Rwanda. Hungary has built a wall. Politicians have found it necessary to take these positions, which only a little while ago they would have condemned as “far right” and beyond the pale, due to public outcry. 

Politicians in Canada would be wise to take note. This convoy is almost surely headed our way. Those who tie themselves too tightly to the mast of multiculturalism may soon find they have no support.

The problem is not immigration as such; at least that is what the politicians say; and I believe them. We need immigration. It is the failure to integrate. This means social division and high crime rates. It turns out that diversity is not our strength. Strength is from movement towards unity, “e pluribus unum.”

And the problem is not racism or discrimination against immigrants. The problem is that some immigrants discriminate.

Compare Chinese with Japanese Canadians. There has been at least as much discrimination against Japanese immigrants as Chinese—most North Americans can’t tell the difference visually, and if they can, history gives more reason to resent the Japanese. The Chinese were never interred. However, much as I love the Chinese, Chinese do not integrate, and the Japanese do. The Chinese stick together in “Chinatowns.” Japanese intermarry and engage with the culture. There are no, or few, “Japantowns.”

When Europeans move into some other country and then stay aloof, sticking to their own neighbourhoods and not learning the language or culture, we condemn this. We see them as colonizers. 

It works the same way regardless of skin colour. Immigrants who do not integrate are colonizers. They want to change the country they come to to suit them; and this quite properly causes resentment among those already there. They have their own culture, have a right to it, and want to preserve it. Unlike the immigrants, they did not make a choice to change.

An intelligent government can predict and should distinguish among immigrant groups who will strengthen the country, and who will lead to problems. Much is predictable based on cultural characteristics. Chinese, for example, do not integrate well because Confucianism does not recognize any responsibility towards anyone with whom you do not have some formal relationship. Strangers are ghosts. Therefore foreigners are ghosts.

You can also see it from experience. Filipinos are good at integrating. Greeks make good immigrants. Koreans make good immigrants. Sikhs make good immigrants. Jews make good immigrants. Lebanese Christians make good immigrants. They are quickly contributing to the mainstream culture.

Muslims make poor immigrants, for predictable reasons. Islam is not compatible with liberal democracy, Canadian social norms, and religious pluralism. In principle, in Islam, no government is legitimate that is not Muslim, and enforcing Islam as state religion. No law is legitimate that does not conform to shariah law. 

Accordingly, any Muslim immigrant is in principle hostile to the government and alienated from the non-Muslim majority.

You may well argue that this assumption is not fair to “moderate Muslims.” But if someone is prepared to reject the moral code with which they were raised, and which they claim to follow, are they a good bet to be a moral person? Are they not also likely to be a problem, perhaps a worse problem?

I say this with great respect to Islam and to my own Muslim friends. Islam is an admirable ethical system; but it is not compatible with immigration to and assimilation to a non-Muslim nation. Muslims themselves will insist this is so: whenever numbers warrant, they will demand a separate state.