Europe watch

On Europeans and Muslims in their midst...

... mass immigration in Europe was predicated on several assumptions, nearly all of them false. Needing cheap labor to fuel their expiring postwar industrial economies, Europeans assumed that the immigrants they turned to would be temporary; that they would not qualify for welfare; and that those who remained would assimilate and shed the cultural mores and habits of their home countries. The Europeans were wrong on all counts. When its textile mills and factories closed in the sixties and seventies, Europe was left with a vast, imported underclass with one tenuous link to its adopted countries: the welfare payments on which it had come to rely.

The demographic transformation was profound. Europe has always had immigration, but the scale of its midcentury influx was without precedent. And one group led the way. In the middle of the twentieth century, there were practically no Muslims in Europe; today, it is estimated, there are about 20 million, including 5 million in France, 4 million in Germany, and 2 million in Britain. Equally dramatic was the change in immigrants’ economic fortunes. In the sixties and seventies, Germany’s Turkish migrant workers actually boasted higher labor-force participation than native Germans did. Today, unemployment in Germany’s Turkish community tops 40 percent—three times the national unemployment rate. Nor is Germany an outlier. Some 40 percent of Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands are on welfare, Caldwell reports, as are two-thirds of French imams. Europeans bear much of the blame for this bleak state of affairs, Caldwell argues. In their shortsighted focus on the economic fruits of foreign labor, they never developed an effective strategy to integrate immigrants into society. Instead, they drove them apart with flawed public policy. Welfare is one example; the segregation of immigrant communities is another. In a fascinating chapter exploring the emergence of “ethnic colonies” in Europe, Caldwell considers the case of Bergsjön, a suburb of Gothenburg in western Sweden. Built in the sixties as a vacation retreat for working-class Swedish families, it had by 2006 become a dumping ground for immigrants from countries like Somalia. Cut off from the country at large, and with few job prospects in their area, 40 percent of Bergsjön’s families are on welfare. Caldwell sees this as part of a destructive tendency in European countries to “warehouse immigrants” in places rejected by their own citizens.