Hello all,

In 1997 and 1998 I was living in the UK and took a trip with my wife to Marseilles. I was dumbfounded by what I observed. It seemed to me that the entire city of Marseilles was Muslim. I know this probably sounds pretty far out but that was the impression I had at the time.

Some time ago I was in a conversation with a friend of mine who said he read an article about the changing face of Europe. The thrust of the article was that cities throughout Europe are increasingly experiencing shifts in populations. This is certainly not news, however, the article went on to suggest that the Muslim population in cities such as Paris, Berlin, even London, is growing exponentially and having an impact on European society on a whole.

Now before I'm accused of xenophobia, I'd simply like to ask if any of you are versed in immigration law as it applies to the various European countries? Aren't some countries tightening the belt on immigration? Is the influx of Muslim immigrants resulting in push back from natives? Are there more Jean-Marie Le Pens out there capitalizing on this? Are there any countries currently sighted for best practices when it comes to immigration within Europe? If so, who and why?

Thanks all. Curious as always to see the replies from this lot.

Dag Hammarsjkold

What would you call "best practice"?

Well, that's part of the problem. I'm not really sure. I suspect a best practice would allow for a percentage of immigrants from x amount of countries per year. Such a policy would be nuanced enough to also take into account a percentage of people seeking political asylum.

At some point I suppose there are logarithms that egg heads have already figured out that take into account the availability of resources in a particular community such as jobs, housing, subsidies for the poor, educational infrastructure etc that would allow for incremental increases in population while avoiding the pitfalls of overwhelming a given system already tending to its community's needs.

I'm curious to learn if in European countries those logarithms (assuming they exist on some level) factor in religious affiliations. I assume this varies from country to country but I'm guessing on all of this. If in fact that is the case, then I wonder what the politics of loosening or tightening those algorithms looks like.

For example, is France more "open" to immigrants than say Denmark? How does Italy compare to say Spain? England to Germany? Expand the question to Muslims and I think things could start to get interesting.

I could google all of this but I figure this group would know.

I suggest you read this book.

In The Myth of the Muslim Tide, Doug Saunders offers a brave challenge to these ideas, debunking popular misconceptions about the effects of Islamic immigration, the beliefs, activities and growth rates of these new arrivals. He demonstrates how exactly the same arguments and political reactions greeted earlier religious-minority immigrant groups, especially Jews and Catholics. Above all, he provides a set of concrete proposals to help absorb these newcomers and make immigration work. Rather than responding to our neighbours with fear and resentment, this book shows us how we can make this change work to our advantage.

Drawing on voluminous demographic, statistical, scholarly and historical documentation, Saunders examines the real lives and circumstances of Muslim immigrants in the West: their politics, their beliefs, their observances and their degrees of assimilation. His work will become a vital handbook in the culture wars that threaten to dominate North American and European elections and media discussions in 2012 and afterwards, and will provoke considerable debate over the actual nature of our polyglot societies.

http://muslimtide.com/

An easier synopsis
http://dougsaunders.net/2013/09/10-myth ... -the-west/

example

5. Muslim immigrants in the West hold the same backward views that Muslims do in the Middle East and Pakistan

Actually, Muslims change their cultural views dramatically when they emigrate. For example, 62% of American Muslims say that “a way can be found for the state of Israel to exist so that the rights of Palestinians are addressed” — a rate barely lower than that of average Americans (67%), and vastly ahead of the miniscule response among Middle Eastern Muslims — for whom between 20% and 40% agreed with that statement.

Similarly, 39% of American Muslims and 47% of German Muslims say they tolerate homosexuality, compared to single-figure responses in most Islamic countries — and those rates are rising with each immigrant generation. On these important questions, Muslim immigrants are converging with Western values fast

.

dag hammarsjkold wrote:Well, that's part of the problem. I'm not really sure. I suspect a best practice would allow for a percentage of immigrants from x amount of countries per year. Such a policy would be nuanced enough to also take into account a percentage of people seeking political asylum.

You are suggesting quotas. There are various problems with quotas, such as what happens when you need to change them - it becomes a political bun-fight, and companies that want to import skilled labour complain about restrictions to free movement, especially if quotas run out during a year.

At some point I suppose there are logarithms that egg heads have already figured out that take into account the availability of resources in a particular community such as jobs, housing, subsidies for the poor, educational infrastructure etc that would allow for incremental increases in population while avoiding the pitfalls of overwhelming a given system already tending to its community's needs.

I very much doubt it (and I assume you mean 'algorithms' rather than 'logarithms'). Immigrants are not always a burden for a start - often they come to work, and so contribute more on average than the host nationals, at least at the outset, in financial terms, as they will be earning money, spending it, paying taxed etc, which increases demand and economic activity and may lead to more job demand domestically.

The current UK coalition came to power with a promise from the Prime Minister and the largest party to cut net* immigration to the "tens of thousands" (by which it was assumed they meant to less than 100,000 per year). It was cited by the Prime Minister as a "no ifs or buts" promise. And the government has failed miserably: in 2010 the level was about 250,000. It is now nearly 300,000.

[* "net" meaning that emigration out of the UK to non-EU countries would of course be offsetting the number, so it's not a measure of the absolute number of immigrants]

EU nations (so most of Europe) have by treaty agreed that citizens have plenty of rights to free movement. So that means national governments are limited in how they can control intra-EU migration.

Non-EU migration is more controlled, but there are variations for historical reasons as much as anything. So, those nations that had empires and colonies tend to have looser restrictions on people coming from those past or present possessions. This is why Britain has many people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin, as well as Indians, Caribbeans, and more recently sub-Saharan Africans. Likewise France has for many years had an influx of North African people, so as Marseilles is the main southern port it was the point of entry for a large proportion, so there has for generations been a significant Arab Muslim minority there. (although it is not a "Muslim" city - it is estimated that about 1/3 of people there are Muslim).

Some immigration is of course uncontrolled because it is clandestine. So Spain and Italy in particular see a lot of migration from North Africa across the Med (and part of this has a massive human cost as people-traffickers are not the most caring of couriers).

Germany does not have much of a colonial history, but has a large immigrant population from across Southern and Eastern Europe, and also Turkey. This is because of wanting to import labour, and also a large number of people wanting to come to work in what is the continent's largest and most stable economy.

I'm curious to learn if in European countries those logarithms (assuming they exist on some level) factor in religious affiliations. I assume this varies from country to country but I'm guessing on all of this. If in fact that is the case, then I wonder what the politics of loosening or tightening those algorithms looks like.

As I don't know of such algorithms and nations are not really shouting about immigration quotas, the question is probably moot. But even if they did exist, I can't see that there is any hint of some kind of religious measurement at all.

And I don't really know what you are driving at. Are you simply suggesting that in addition to quotas we might set them at different levels because the source countries are a bit Muslim? Or are you suggesting that within such quotas we might have a check on how many Muslims are allowed in or not?

For example, is France more "open" to immigrants than say Denmark? How does Italy compare to say Spain? England to Germany? Expand the question to Muslims and I think things could start to get interesting.

I guess it partly depends on whether you mean in theory or in practice (policy is one thing, outcomes are different) let alone public opinion as opposed to 'national' government views.

Try here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigratio ... opulations

There is not a massive difference in outcome. The proportion of foreign-born residents varies from 7.5% to 15% (Ireland is an outlier because there are a lot of UK-born residents who consider themselves Irish, and with a small population this makes a massive difference)

For non-EU born residents the range is even narrower - 5.3% to 9.3%

But this is outcome rather than policy.

I could google all of this but I figure this group would know.

We do have one UK-based member who knows a lot about UK immigration policy, but he may not wish to discuss it much, I dunno. Not sure if we can compare with the other 50 nations of our continent.

There's a lot of chatter in the States that Europe does not assimilate immigrants as well as the U.S. for whatever historical reasons. I think that Dag is just wondering whether that is true.

Ray Jay wrote:There's a lot of chatter in the States that Europe does not assimilate immigrants as well as the U.S. for whatever historical reasons. I think that Dag is just wondering whether that is true.

Reading the questions, it seemed less about how we deal with people when they are here, and more about how many immigrants we allow in in the first place. Thus references to immigration laws, looking at numbers/proportions of immigrants by country of origin etc.

So if Dag meant what you think he did, he went an odd way about saying it....

Also, there's all sorts of chatter in the US about stuff. I hear about Eurabia and no-go cities etc.

The topic title seems a bit xenophobic...

It's not an unreasonable topic, I think, when viewed in the context of assimilation.

The link that Ricky posted shows that Muslims in western countries tend to have more moderate views, at least on Israel, and probably on many other things. Of course, that may be entirely due to self-selection (e.g. only people with more moderate views will choose to emigrate) but it could be assimilation, and its moderating affect on extreme views.

From what I know from Europeans who have emigrated to the United States, they tell me that the USA is a much more welcoming and accepting country of immigrants, culturally, than European states. Their kids were born in the USA and they are Americans, and people don't questions that, even though their parents may look or speak differently. One family we're friendly with, she's Swiss and he's French--they became citizens so they could vote for Obama in 2008--and I remember her speaking passionately about how difficult it would be for me, culturally, to become Swiss, because I would always be different, an outsider, and my kids as well, but how she felt that the USA was her home, and she truly felt and was treated like an American, even thought she has a ridiculously thick French accent. And I'm a white guy. Imagine if I had dark skin and wore a long beard and unusual clothing.

Separation is bad, integration is good. Culturally, it's hard for many muslims to integrate in Europe and that's bad for everyone.

We do have one UK-based member who knows a lot about UK immigration policy, but he may not wish to discuss it much, I dunno.

I'm happy to discuss it. It's a complicated area though, and fraught with difficulty.

In truth I'm not sure that immigration is the main driver behind the so-called 'Islamification' of Europe these days. The big wave of Islamic migration has already happened and the rules have been significantly tightened since. It's more that Islamic families tend to have much higher birthrates and so their proportion of the population is inevitably increasing. There are also cultural factors of course. I know a lot of guys from the Pakistani community here in Sheffield and a very high proportion of them have married girls from back home in Pakistan. It seems to be a tradition among that community, and the result is that there's a constant stream of new migrants with limited English language skills and no real chance of integrating who then pass that on to their children. it's changing though. I've noticed that while most of the Asian guys I know in their mid to late 30s are married to women from back home in the village, the same is not true of the younger guys in their 20s, who often seem to be kicking back against this familial expectation and would prefer to marry somebody who can they can relate to. As such it's possible that this is going to prove to be a temporary thing.

sass

It's more that Islamic families tend to have much higher birthrates and so their proportion of the population is inevitably increasing

Saunders research disagrees with this Sass. Especially among immigrants

2. Immigrants from Muslim countries are going to swamp us

People look at the huge families of many new Muslim immigrants and imagine them multiplying at exponential rates. But this is a bit of an illusion — as are many of the figures suggesting that Muslim immigrants have fertility rates higher than in their homelands. This is because most new immigrants have most of their children in the years immediately after their arrival. The way we calculate Total Fertility Rate — the measure of average family size — is by taking the total number of births a woman has had and extrapolating it across her fertile life. As a result, because immigrants tend to have most of their children soon after arriving, scholarly analyses of their actual family sizes show that they appear to have more children than they really do.

In reality, the family sizes of Muslim immigrant groups are converging fast with those of average Westerners — faster, it seems, than either Jewish or Catholic immigrants did in their time. Muslims in France and Germany are now having only 2.2 children per family, barely above the national average. And while Pakistani immigrants in Britain have 3.5 children each, their British-born daughters have only 2.5. Across Europe, the difference between the Muslim and non-Muslim fertility rate has fallen from 0.7 to 0.4, and is headed toward a continent-wide convergence.

I think assimilation tends to occur over three generations. By the third generation there is ;little significant difference between immigrant groups and the population as a whole. Early immigrant families in North America all had larger families and higher birth rates, no matter where they came from, and they all regressed as economic and social conditions, conditioned their behaviour.

That's one book Ricky, I'm not sure what you think it really proves, especially since the figures quoted clearly indicate that Muslim families currently have a much higher birthrate. Yes, it may well be the case that this will decline over time, but that hardly invalidates my point, which was that the increasing proportion of the population that's Islamic is driven more by new births than it is by immigration these days.

Of course, what's also important to point out is that we also have emigration from this country as well as immigration to it. With the exception of a very small number of affluent Pakistanis who return home to live in luxury having made their money here, the people who choose to emigrate are non-Islamic. This also serves to accelerate the process by which the Muslims are becoming a greater proportion of the population.

I still think that you have to distinguish between the US and Europe. From what I read, there are many more Muslims in the UK and France joining ISIS than is the case in the US. Joining ISIS suggests that assimilation is not working as its values starkly contrast with those of the west.

sass

That's one book Ricky

Its the source data he reports that (probably) contradicts you... That is if the fertility rates that are extrapolated turn out the way he says they will and have in recent past.

ray

I still think that you have to distinguish between the US and Europe. From what I read, there are many more Muslims in the UK and France joining ISIS than is the case in the US. Joining ISIS suggests that assimilation is not working as its values starkly contrast with those of the west

Of course more European Muslims are joining. There are 9.5 times the number in Europe than there are in the US, so there's lots more to draw from. 19 million Muslims live in the EU, and more than two million call the United States home. Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war, about 2,500 people from those places (as well as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) have traveled to Syria to fight, according to the Soufan Group, a U.S. security consulting firm.The American Muslims have been in the US longer as immigration in the US from some countries became very difficult after 9/11.

Plus its harder to travel to Syria from NA. And, Americans are notoriously poor at foreign travel. Even American Muslims. (This last part is not meant entirely seriously.)

There are always going to be a few who can be attracted to extremist groups, particularly those who respond to the romantic notions that ISIS puts out on the internet. The question is, at what point is the number significant. And are the numbers enough to represent a true trend?
Moreover, if the kinds of attitudes measured in Saunders data about European Muslims is right, then only a few lunatics on the fringe and some dazed and confused youth are responding to ISIS. Everyone else is worrying about paying their mortgages and wondering how Arsene Wenger keeps his job year after year.

Ricky:

Of course more European Muslims are joining. There are 9.5 times the number in Europe than there are in the US, so there's lots more to draw from. 19 million Muslims live in the EU, and more than two million call the United States home. Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war, about 2,500 people from those places (as well as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) have traveled to Syria to fight, according to the Soufan Group, a U.S. security consulting firm.The American Muslims have been in the US longer as immigration in the US from some countries became very difficult after 9/11.

Plus its harder to travel to Syria from NA. And, Americans are notoriously poor at foreign travel. Even American Muslims. (This last part is not meant entirely seriously.)

Ricky, this is an example of why people don't like your argumentation style. There are 2.9 million Muslims in the UK and 2.6 million in the US. However, there are reports that there have been thousands of UK Muslims who have joined ISIS, but only a handful from the US. Americans do know how to travel and there are direct flights to Turkey and elsewhere in the Middle East. I don't think Syria is the only point of entry.