A Question of Assimilation
As the Danish cartoon virus continues to spread from Europe to the Middle East to Central Asia to Africa and beyond, politicians, religious leaders, and the media have all come to frame the issue as a case of freedom of expression and the limits of tolerance in an age of global communications. A cartoon that is supposed to be "funny" in Copenhagen leads to riots and death in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Middle East. The origin of the crisis, however, is rooted in a local European context, revealing the Continent's greatest postwar failure: its catastrophic record in integrating large and growing numbers of immigrant minorities--especially the second-generation children of Muslim immigrants.
If the Muslim protesters in Denmark had not pressured various Mideast governments to act, the story would have been nothing more than a case of bad taste and poor judgment by an obscure Copenhagen daily. But the Danish case is just one in a series of recent European eruptions. Item: The rioters in France last October and November were overwhelmingly the children of immigrants. Item: The terrorist bombers in London last year were second-generation immigrants. Item: The killer of Theo Van Gough, the Dutch filmmaker who had taken a controversial stance on Muslim immigrants, was also the child of such immigrants. Item: Several of the 9/11 hijackers had been enrolled as students in various prestigious German campuses.
How do we explain Europe's sorry record on immigration at precisely the time it will need more immigration? How will Europe manage to integrate into its economy and society the estimated 50 million new immigrants it will need in the decades ahead to cope with its declining fertility rates and rapidly aging populations--not to mention its over-the-top welfare system that will require new immigrant workers to pay for the benefits of its retirees?
To understand the problem, it is instructive to compare the situation in Europe with the recent U.S. experience. America today is seeing the largest wave of immigration in its history. Why is immigration a dream here but a nightmare on the other side of the Atlantic? There are at least three sets of important differences in the nature of immigration in Europe and the United States.
First, experience matters. Large-scale immigration in western Europe is a relatively new phenomenon, going back just to the end of World War II. Prior to that, Europe was a continent of emigration, not immigration. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) and into the first decade of the 20th century, some 50 million Europeans left for the New World. These immigrants settled--indeed, made--cities like New York, Montreal, and Buenos Aires. In the United States, the current wave of immigration is the fourth large wave that has substantially altered the fabric of our nation over the past five generations.
Second, policies matter. If immigration gave birth to the vibrant multiethnic nation we are today, the parturition in Europe was very different, For a long time, western European nations--the Scandinavian countries, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and others--felt that when it came to immigration, they could be a little bit pregnant. Hence the various "guest worker" programs and temporary-asylum initiatives that have resulted in Europe's current dilemma. These temporary arrangements proved to be quite permanent. But the ambivalence with which Europe allowed large-scale immigration has had defining consequences. The temporary workers and asylum seekers came to be a permanent reality without any significant public debate and conscious understanding of the long-term changes immigration was causing. Policies, for example, on education kept changing from instruction only in the language of the country of origin (if Turks were just temporary guest workers, why should they learn German?) to bilingual education, to education in the language of the new country. Differences in immigration policy between Europe and the United States are the most obvious when it comes to the ease with which immigrants can attain full citizenship. In the United States, all children of immigrants born here are automatically citizens. In countries like Germany, by contrast, there was the "law of the blood," changed only recently, saying you could be a German citizen only if you had German blood; America observes the jus solis or "law of the soil," which means if you are born here, you are a citizen. Immigrants born in many European countries have to wait until adulthood before they can even apply for citizenship.
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