By Walter Russell Mead
The modern Fordist paradises of the industrial world have seen their
birthrates crater to the point that mass immigration is the only thing
that can keep their economies staffed. This is riskier than it looks.
The industrialized West is undertaking a historic experiment in real
time: by allowing and even encouraging mass immigration from countries
with vastly different cultural foundations, Western societies are
testing whether people with deep cultural roots and few if any common
loyalties can build cohesive and coherent societies in the 21st century.
For countries like the United States, Canada and Australia, this is a
less risky experiment than for others. The English speaking societies
of the British diaspora have a long history of receiving and
assimilating millions of immigrants. The process has rarely been easy or
without costs, both to the hosts and to the new arrivals, but over time
it has largely been a success. Those societies are wealthier, wiser,
and intellectually and culturally richer because of their immigrant
populations, and tension between Anglo-Saxon and Celtic “first settlers”
and immigrants from later waves tends to disappear after one or two
generations.
Pessimists worry that immigrants from Mexico and other Spanish
speaking countries in the Western Hemisphere will change America’s
cultural balance, and/or that Muslim immigrants will fail to assimilate,
becoming a permanent liability. But the hopeful signs outweigh the
negative indicators, at least where I sit. The fashionable residential
borough of Queens where I live is ground central for immigration in the
Greater New York area, and Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Colombians, Mexicans,
Ecuadoreans, African Americans, and Anglos all seem to be getting along
reasonably well. That isn’t a scientific survey, I acknowledge, but the
opinion pollsters and others supplement my unscientific sampling of the
streets of Queens. The American assimilation process still seems to be
in pretty good shape.
Europe’s problems with immigration, though experience differs from
one country to the next, are much deeper. A commendable desire to avoid
inflaming tensions and setting one group against another largely
inhibits the establishment discourse about the nature and severity of
Europe’s immigration issues, but driving this issue out of the
respectable mainstream only empowers groups like the National Front in
France and much uglier parties in countries like Hungary and Greece to
exploit a hot button public issue that the mainstream parties do their
best to ignore.
Much of the discussion of the problem focuses on the difficulty of
integrating immigrants, particularly those of either Muslim, Roma or
sub-Saharan African origins. There is much discussion of the perceived
incompatibility of Islamic theology with the beliefs and practices of
the postmodern, post-Christian and postindustrial West. Roma and
sub-Saharan African cultures are, for different reasons, seen by some as
too far removed from the social norms of contemporary Europe to allow
for easy assimilation.
While it is difficult to construct a public discussion around these
issues that steers a course between the Scylla of bigotry and the
Charybdis of bland political correctness, there are important issues to
be addressed. As one example, many (though by no means all) of the Roma
seeking to take advantage of European Union mobility guarantees to
escape the poverty and discrimination they face in their eastern
homelands lack the skills and education to get and keep decent jobs in
western Europe. Western Europe is not exactly a job creating dynamo for
low skilled positions; many who move there will live on the fringes of
society rather than carving out a comfortable, secure place in their new
homes. For many of the immigrants, that’s an improvement: if you must
live by your wits on the margins of society it is better to live on the
margins of a rich country than of a poor one. Better France, Germany and
Denmark than Bulgaria and Romania. It’s important for mainstream
politicians to be able to discuss and address issues of this kind
because they are very much on the public mind and will not go away.
There are other problems that arise from the nature of immigration
into Europe. In France for example, immigrants from North Africa make up
a very large proportion of the immigrant population. Their proportion
is so large, and their difficulties with integrating into French society
are so similar and so acute, that in a significant number of cases they
are developing a North African or Islamist identity that is cohesive
enough to form a rival pole of attraction. Instead of assimilating into a
French identity, there is a tendency among some to assimilate into a
permanent minority identity that could pose long term problems for the
French state.
The biggest problems that Europe faces, however, stem less from the
nature of the immigrants than from the nature of Europe’s social order.
Since the 19th century, Europe has moved toward the creation of the
ethnic nation state. The central demand of European democrats going back
to the era of the French Revolution was for the right of each people to
construct a state of their own. Every people had the right to live
under a government of their own choosing, under laws that reflected
their own cultural values and goals, and under policies that would
promote the culture and well being of the gens that constituted the
foundation of the state.
So powerful was the drive for ethnic nation states in European
history that millions were killed and many millions more driven out of
their ancestral homes in order to create these states. The Balkan wars
of the 1990s were only the latest example of the irresistible force of
ethnic nationalism in European affairs. Kosovars, Croats, Bosniaks,
Serbs, and Macedonians could not bear to live under the rule of people
who spoke a different language, had a different religion or cultural
tradition. Now most of the peoples of the former Yugoslavia live in
ethnically based states, statelets or proto-states and, after the usual
atrocities and expulsions, things have settled down.
The Balkans are not unique. Poland and then-Czechoslovakia expelled
literally millions of Germans in 1945 and 1946; today those parts of the
world are peaceful, democratic and the dominant ethnic group is
overwhelmingly the people for whom the state is named and whose cultural
values it is intended to represent. Centuries of anti-Semitic hatred,
accelerating dramatically all across Europe as nationalism became more
powerful in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, only abated with the
wholesale murder or emigration of the vast majority of European Jews.
Even today, wherever serious ethnic diversity persists, states are in
trouble. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia both broke up after the fall of
the Iron Curtain. Many Catalans and Basques want to leave Spain. The
Flemish and the Walloons keep Belgium poised on the brink of breaking
up. The Scots are pushing to leave the UK. Tens of thousands have died
in fighting between Turks and Kurds. Russia faces huge problems and
tensions around many of its ethnic and religious minorities. Russian
speaking minorities in the Baltic republics remain intensely
problematic. The presence of Magyar minorities in Slovakia and Romania
complicates Hungary’s relations with both of these countries.
In Europe, even as church and state increasingly separated in the
last 150 years, nation and state fused. The multinational states of
Europe’s past (the Austrian, Ottoman, German and Russian empires) began
to break down into their component national subunits. In those new
national sovereignties, the promotion of the culture and the language of
the dominant ethnic group was an integral element of their political
structure. You had to speak Polish to teach in interwar Polish
universities or work for the Polish civil service—just as Estonia today
wants to preserve jobs and privileges for people who are fluent in
Estonian. From one end of Europe to the other, the legitimacy of states
is bound up with the identification of the state with the national
majority.
More than that, the solidarity that underlies European social safety
networks is grounded in a sense of ethnic identity and cohesion. The
nationalist movements across Europe aimed to resolve class conflicts
between the elites and the masses within ethnicities by heightening a
sense of solidarity. “We Danes,” “we Czechs,” “we Poles” had to stick
together and take care of our own. (America’s looser ethnic bonds
account in part for our weaker social safety networks; many Americans
see the poor as other and different from themselves.)
Europe’s system of protecting middle aged workers by hanging the
young out to dry is in part a system of ethnic protection. The middle
aged are much more ethnically homogenous than the young. One consequence
of high youth unemployment in countries like Greece, Italy and Spain is
systemic social marginalization of immigrant populations, who not only
tend to be much younger than the host population but who also sometimes
lack the credentials demanded by the increasingly formalized and
bureaucratized employment process in many European countries. This is
not helping the cause of peaceful assimilation, and one suspects that,
as European populations become less culturally homogenous, support for
generous welfare states that primarily benefit immigrants will gradually
erode.
In many European countries, France included, ethnic nationalism is a
force that animates both socialist and conservative nationalist
politics. One of the reasons the French Socialists fear the National
Front so much is that many socialist voters support the party because
they see socialist welfare policies and socialist opposition to
“Anglo-Saxon capitalism” as a way to protect the interests of ordinary
French people. And by ordinary French people they emphatically do not
mean Roma immigrants from Bulgaria or Arab and Berber immigrants from
North Africa.
Europe’s social engineers of the last generation seem to have assumed
that the “dark forces” of nationalism and chauvinism had been left
behind. That was partly true; the horrors of the two world wars have
made many (though far from all) Europeans unwilling to fight anymore on
ethnic grounds. But the subsidence of ethnic nationalism in European
politics was also a function of the mass ethnic cleansings and genocidal
killings that left most European nation states fairly homogenous. There
was no “German Question” in Polish or Czech politics because there were
no more Germans in these countries. The “Jewish Question” largely faded
in postwar Europe, in part because of revulsion against Nazism, but
also because the Jews were gone. Europe’s architects liked to believe
that Europeans had transcended ethnic hatred, but much of Europe’s
postwar peace came from the success of ethnic hatred in creating
homogenous countries.
What we now see in Europe as the Great Immigration Experiment
continues is a steady drift toward a new politics of ethnicity.
Nationalist sentiments and movements are gaining force throughout the
region. (In this respect, Putin’s Russia is moving in the same direction
as its neighbors, though in an even rougher way.) Europe’s remaining
multiethnic unions (especially the UK, Belgium, Russia, and Spain) face
strong secessionist movements. Throughout Europe, the new nationalism is
in revolt against the cosmopolitan projects of the European Union, and
it is also in revolt against mass immigration and the threatened loss of
ethnic cohesion and homogeneity. We don’t know how effective the
European mainstream parties will be at suppressing the growing power of
the neo-nationalists, but it looks as if so far the trend over time is
for the center, left and right, to decline and for the nationalists to
rise.
In America, these problems are not as severe. Our nationalism is not
quite as ethnically focused as nationalism tends to be in Europe, and
our past history of successful assimilation conditions both the
newcomers and the host population to believe that our current waves of
immigrants will ultimately settle in just as past waves have done. What
also limits the effect of anti-immigrant populism in American politics
is that the two groups most powerfully and negatively affected (low
income and working class African Americans and whites) have historically
been at odds with each other. Each major American political party is an
uneasy coalition in which pro-immigration forces on the whole outweigh
anti-immigrant ones, and African American and Tea Party-like immigration
opponents are unlikely to form an effective coalition on this issue.
Nevertheless, it would be foolhardy to believe that there is no
practical limit to the ability of the United States to absorb new
immigrants; there is some annual number x between zero and ten million
at which anti-immigration feeling would likely reimpose some
contemporary version of the 1920s quota system. Illegal immigration is
particularly costly and divisive; thoughtful immigration proponents need
to pay much more than lip service to the goal of policing the borders,
or anti-immigration sentiment could become much more powerful in this
country.
But if America is running some risks in going ahead with mass
immigration, Europe is playing with fire. It is not primarily because
many of the immigrants are from Muslim backgrounds; it is not because of
their skin color. It is fundamentally because they are foreign: “not
us.” Modernization in Europe was a process of creating ethnically
homogenous nation states and, on the far side of the murders and
expulsions necessary to create that new status quo, building
institutions in which the homogenous states could work together.
Europe forgot that hard truth, and partly as a result, the health of
the multinational European Union and the political stability of many of
its ever less homogenous nation states are increasingly under threat.
The contrast in living standards between Europe and its neighboring
regions makes immigration attractive; the implosion of Europe’s
birthrate makes mass immigration economically necessary. But the
resulting diversity in nation states whose identity is closely tied to
ethnicity threatens to summon up the dark demons of past ethnic
conflict.
Bad economic times intensify these tensions—just as the hard economic
times of the 1930s exacerbated the hatreds and rivalries of the day.
Europe today is simultaneously creating depression-like conditions
through the euro austerity drive, rekindling intra-European animosities
as northern and Club Med countries squabble over whose fault the
catastrophic euro situation really is, and, to throw gasoline on the
fire, experiencing accelerated immigration from the east and south.
It is not at all clear that Europe’s leaders fully understand the
risks they are running. Polls putting the National Front ahead in France
should serve as a wakeup call; mass immigration poses a serious danger
to Europe’s social peace.
[Image: Members of the Pakistani community in Athens stand on
January 19, 2013 in front of a banner with the portrait of a 27-year-old
Pakistani migrant victim in the center of Athens. Hundreds of Greeks
and other nationals marched peacefully against racism and fascism.
Nearly 3,000 people joined the rally that was set up by municipalities,
organisations, migrant communities and main opposition party radical
leftists Syriza. This week, authorities arrested a 29-year-old
firefighter and another Greek man aged 25 for the murder of the
27-year-old Pakistani migrant in Athens. Courtesy ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images)
1 comment:
Mass immigration of uneducated, unskilled people, not fluent in the host language, many not willing to assimilate, during a recession that is already hurting the host citizens is not just bad policy, it's insanity.
Expecting hard working people that are struggling to supporting their own families, to support low/no income foreigners, tells a citizenry that their government's allegiance isn't to them. It is a simmering disaster in the making.
It doesn't matter what country or culture; forced redistribution of a country's wealth will ultimately lead to anarchy or rebellion.
America has welcomed hard working people that wished to be Americans for hundreds of years, they were/are the reason for America's success. But indiscriminately opening America's borders to any and all takers, cheapens the words "American Citizen".
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