Islamic Immigration in Europe

Reading through Christchurch’s Press last Saturday it was pleasing to come across a relatively right-wing review of Bruce Bawer’s book, While Europe Slept: How radical Islam is destroying the West from within.

The reviewer, an Anglican vicar from Christchurch called Ron Hay, points out that Bawer says he left America partly in reaction to the Christian right. However, setting in Europe with his gay partner, he discovered that Islamic fundamentalism made its US counterpart look benign:

"Falwell was an unsavoury creep, but he didn’t issue fatwas. James Dobson’s parenting advice was appalling, but he wasn’t telling people to murder their daughters. Pat Robertson just wanted to deny me marriage; the imans wanted to drop a wall on me."

Bawer acknowledges both the rapid growth of aggressive Islam in Europe and Europe’s present policy could well end in disaster. Like many US critics though, he criticizes the Europeans for failing to integrate Muslim immigrants, without recognising that Europe is not the United States, or that the US has no experience of dealing with large numbers of Muslim immigrants.

In contrast to Europe, life is much cheaper in the United States, where recent immigrants can afford to buy cars to get around in, and the economy revolves around flexible labour laws and economies of scale production. Since the cost of living is cheap, people have more disposal income and there is a greater demand for domestic services. Subsequently the US is a great place for someone with limited skills to find work (or a least it was until it became swamped by central American immigrants).

By contrast, life in Europe is crowded, bureaucratic and expensive. Fewer people can afford cars and even if you have a car, the roads are crowded and difficult to navigate. Since life is more expensive, there is also much less need for hired hands like nannies and gardeners. Manufacturing firms have to be smart and innovative to compete with larger US and Japanese competitors, so they need skilled workers who can work with minimum supervision.

Furthermore, since every country has its own language and customs it is difficult to move around and seek out opportunities in other parts of the EU. Europeans countries also tend to have generous and intricate welfare systems, which are largely paid for in advance, and many people feel they should not be extended to recent arrivals.

All this means Europe does not have the ability to accommodate large numbers of immigrants, particularly if they are unskilled and do not understand local laws and customs.

Perhaps the biggest concern though is reproduction differences. In some European countries Muslim immigrants are having three times are many children as indigenous Europeans. As the problems in Palestine show, major differences in reproduction rates between ethnic groups will eventually lead to serious conflict, and the only solution is to keep the different groups apart.

The Europeans do have a right to demand that immigrants adhere to local values, but while you can make it compulsory to learn the local language in schools, its not really possible to force people to integrate if they don’t want to. Just because non-English speaking European immigrants responded to aggressive assimilation policies in the United States during the first half of the 20th Century, does not mean non-European Muslim immigrants will respond in the same way.

Since many Muslim immigrants appear unwilling or unable to integrate, the only options are to curtail further Muslim immigration, introduce voluntary repatriation schemes, and increase incentives for indigenous Europeans to have more children.

A major reason why European birth rates have fallen so low, is the high cost of housing in western Europe, and the dire shortage of housing in Eastern Europe (a legacy of Soviet-era mismanagement). Economic libertarians may loathe to admit it, but subsidised housing was a major factor in the demographic growth that occurred in Europe and Australasia after the end of WWII. (It’s an interesting irony that many baby-boomer libertarians might not have existed if it wasn’t for state subsidised housing!).

If the EU started an ambitious programme to provide more subsidised housing in Eastern Europe, it would help to ease the overcrowding in parts of Western Europe, while providing housing and work opportunities for young Eastern Europeans who are presently flooding west and competing for the limited number of low-skilled jobs with low-income Europeans and recent Muslim immigrants.