Well, I assure you we heard a lot of talk over here about how it was all about religion, showing how fanatic/barbaric/unwilling to assimilate Islamic people are. Very few people pointed out how the motivation wasn’t religion, and I still hear it brought up to slam people of Islamic ancestry as innately religious fanatics.
ARE they having difficulty assimilating? And more so than any other group? Because, again, that’s always part of the anti-immigrant panic rhetoric; THIS batch of immigrants is different than the others and refuses to assimilate. Which typically turns out to be nonsense.
And what makes you think that the anti-Western Islamic people are the ones moving to the West? Nor is bigotry and fanaticism and anti-semitism restricted to the Islamic world.
Except for the roving packs of youths harassing women who violate a misogynist dress code, or father’s who kill their daughters for shaming the family.
When it was reported in the American news media to involve disaffected “Muslim” youth, it became a watchword among Islam bashers for what was wrong with Islam. Those who actually read the information reported about the riots knew that they were not religious, but those who simply scanned headlines or took their news from 20 second TV reports were liable to believe it was a “Muslim” issue.
How many “roving packs” actually exist? I am well aware that there have been that sort of incident, (just as there have been gangs of locals attacking and harrassing the immigrants for twenty or thirty years prior to the immigrants becoming sufficiently numerous to form their own gangs), but neither are examples of “the culture” so much as examples of the fringe of each society.
Similarly, there are any number of Christian (and Hindu and probably Buddhist and animist) fathers and brothers who have, from time to time, killed women for “shaming” their families, but it is hardly an example of mainstream culture in most places where those incidents have occurred.
And they ARE assimilating just fine ( the legal ones at least ). The problems come from the other side; people who don’t want them to. While the xenophobes rant and rave about them taking over, the immigrants worry about how their children are typical Americans with little trace of their ancestral culture. Which, again, is the standard pattern.
You started it, mate. But all right, I’ll break it down for you :
Muslims are (apparently, to you) assimilating just fine in the US. That would be because the amount of Muslim immigrants to the US is negligible, compared to the number of Mexican ones, legal or otherwise. So *you *hear a lot of news and political jibber-jabber about them dang wetbacks who refuse to learn to speako englese and all have 30 kids and live on welfare and all that jazz, and comparatively very little about the loads of immigrants from other places. Because the big immigration panicbutton in the US is Mexico, not Morocco.
Well, where France is concerned, Algeria is Mexico. And Pakistan/India is UK’s Mexico. And Turkey is Germany’s Mexico. And the culture clash is exactly the same, with the exact same numbnuts screaming themselves blue about it on *both *sides of the clash (as der Trihs noted, descendants of immigrants are doubly fucked : too foreign for their home country, too assimilated for their parents. Hence, y’know, riots.). We also get the same bullshit about them refusing to learn proper French/English/German, having 30 kids and abusing welfare.
But we don’t hear much about immigrants from South America. I guess those assimilate just fine. Possibly 'cause they ain’t dang Muslims ?
FWIW, even in France the religious aspect is a relatively new twist to that old saw. Before Sarko, it was a simple affair of them being thieving lazy brownie ragheads, suckling on the [del]federal[/del]Republic’s teat, and that was that.
But he’s real busy polishing *that *turd, so he can pander to the extreme right voter base while at the same time coming off squeaky clean, republican and pro-immigration enough for the center. All the while turning the victims into the bad guys and capitalizing on the post-9/11 zeitgeist every bit as much as Bush did, though perhaps in more despicable ways. Which is no mean feat, when you think about it.
Bah.
That seems to be an important aspect to successful assimilation: the management of the sheer numbers of immigrants, and the pace in which they arrive. It has already been mentioned that European countries have not done as well as they could in encouraging assimilation.
It is not PC to discuss, but I suggest that managing immigration is a wise thing to do.
I am from the UK originally, and I now live in the US. The big immigration issue in the UK isn’t India or Pakistan, it’s Eastern Europeans. Mass immigration from India/Pakistan stopped in the early 70s. The only immigrants from those countries are either professionals or through marriage, students, or illegal immigrants. UK isn’t even the top destination for illegals from India/Pakistan. It’s been Italy for the last few years.
However, many of the Eastern Europeans seem to be heading back to thier own countires since the UK economy is bad right now.
BTW There’s been a big divergence in the Indian and Pakistani communities. Indians are very well assimilated, and are wealthier/more educated than whites on average, whilst many Pakistanis are at the other end of of the spectrum.
The Spanish line “la maté porque era mía” (I killed her because she was mine) comes to mind; until 25 years ago, it was considered justifiable homicide for a man to kill his wife or daughter on grounds of “she made me angry”; two years tops, whereas under the same laws someone killing another guy in a bar fight would risk life without parole (and by “life” I don’t mean “40 years,” which is the current limit, I mean “get buried in the prison’s cementery”). Wives beat up or killed for looking at another man, daughters and wives for “getting uppitty” (ie, not knowing “her place” as a doormat); not-pregnant-anymore unmarried girls being admitted to hospital with a miscarriage caused by the severity of the beating received from Dear Daddy and the Darling Bros.
As for secularization of Muslim immigrants: there is a halal butcher position in my home town’s city-owned abbatoir. Years ago, there were several thefts of very-young lambs in the same night; there had also been a few the previous year, and also all in the same night; one of the cops realized both “crime waves” took place just at the end of Ramadan and ventured a guess that it had been Muslim immigrants who’d gotten a sudden attack of Muslim-ness as it’s a very big holiday. Since the abbatoir was about to create two new jobs due to the population increase (Spain has grown 20% in about 10 years; most immigrants are from our ex-colonies, including Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara), they spoke with the local Muslims and made one of the posts halal.
The point is, not that there are “special accomodations” being put in place, but that 364 days a year these guys were about as secular and troublemaking as your average Catholic Spaniard. There was one case two years ago where a Muslim immigrant raised hell over not wanting his daughters to wear school uniforms or do PE (PE clothes cover everything except your hands and head, with the jacket on)… one guy out of how many thousands? There’s arseholes in every group, these ones make the news only because they’re the new smell in town.
I don’t see why muslim immigrants need to be assimilated. As long as they learn the language (which isn’t a problem here except maybe for some of the first generation who are barely literate and were supposed to come here to work in the mines and then leave) and respect the law, I don’t see any problem. In fact, the only ones calling for assimilation here is the far right, who are maybe not fascist, but pretty damn close.
It is common knowledge that Muslims all across Western Europe have far more difficulty integrating than other minority groups, cite. There is controversy on this point, but some credible academics have concluded that Muslims in Europe have a marked tendency toward self-segregation.
Besides, SomeBodyUK has it right, the number of immigrants into Britain from Eastern Europe dwarfs the number of Muslim immigrants, but while (in my experience) some people have been moaning about how “Dey tuk ur jerrrrrrrbs. Durp de Durp!”, by and large they’ve managed to fit in remarkably well whereas a significant percentage of even 2nd generation Muslim immigrants still refuse to assimilate. For instance, 40% of young British Muslims want Sharia in the UK.
I know it’s not a one-way street, but anti-western feeling is extremely high in the Islamic world. Much of this has been carried over to France, Britain, and other countries. You may say this is because of the Iraq War and I agree that this may have exacerbated things, but I honestly can’t remember a time when there wasn’t significant anti-Western sentiment in the Islamic world, even when we went to war with Milosovic to protect Muslim populations.
Maybe we could. However, I can’t find any numbers at the moment but I suspect this may be due to the fact that a lot more Muslims immigrate to Western Europe than America.
This is really here nor there but the only reason Bosniaks needed protection in the first place was because of a weapons embargo put in place by the west. It could be said that the only thing that saved the poorly armed muslims of Bosnia in the opening years of the conflict were illegally smuggled arms from Iran.