In 2010 I wrote in VDARE about the argument between German central banker Thilo Sarrazin and German philosopher Jurgen Habermas over immigration policy. (Sarrazin had published a million-selling bestseller book of tables and graphs of data with the prophetic title Germany Abolishes Itself. Habermas has written at vast length over the years about “communicative rationality” in the “public sphere.” But being factually ignorant about subjects like immigration and IQ, poor old Habermas couldn’t figure out any way to rationally communicate arguments against Sarrazin’s scholarship other than to assert it was bad and false and shouldn’t be discussed in the sphere of the public.)

In the article, I pointed out that Germany has already had lots of experience with importing Muslims, typically Turks (who tend to be less trouble than Arabs), to boost the work force to pay for the German welfare state. How’d that work out anyway?

There, immigration from the Muslim world since the abolition of guest worker programs in the 1970s has been more or less an elaborate form of welfare fraud carried out through marriages arranged to obtain “family reunification” visas. As Christopher Caldwell pointed out in Reflections upon the Revolution in Europe from 1971 to 2000 the number of foreign-born people in Germany rose by 150 percent—but the number of foreign-born workers didn’t go up at all.

Muslim Turks in Germany tend to retire early, go on disability, claim to be working at home taking care of children, claim to be unable to find work, etc. etc. In other words: a culture of welfare fraud.