Summary: The US news media ignore, as best they can, effects of Europe’s giant experiment with open borders (using their people as lab rats). Here is some info and analysis, and pointers to Europe’s future.

“Europe will be part of the Arabic west, of the Maghreb, by the end of the century at the latest. Migration and demographics are working towards this. …According to current trends, Europe will have Muslim majorities in the population by the end of the 21st century at the latest. ”

— Interview with Princeton historian Bernard Lewis in Die Welt, 28 July 2004.

Europe’s elites, without consulting their people, have began one of the great social experiments of history. They have opened their borders to peoples from radically different cultures, without requiring them to assimilate (multiculturalism is their doctrine). The major news media maintain, as best they can, a blackout on reporting or discussion of this. But a few reports have emerged. Such as Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West (2009).

His predictions were shocking then, but look prescient a decade later – much like that of Professor Lewis 14 years ago. (Both were met by screams of denial from the Left). So we should carefully consider what else he said. Here is a brief introduction to this fact-rich, thoroughly documented book. His numbers are a decade old! Especially note the last paragraph, undercutting the complacent faith that all will end well.

“Europe is now, for the first time in its modern history, a continent of migrants. Of the 375 million people in Western Europe, 40 million are living outside their countries of birth. In almost all Western European countries, the population of immigrants and their children approaches or surpasses 10% . Even the historically poor and backward countries of peripheral Catholic Europe, such as Ireland (14.1% immigrant) and Spain (11.1%), have become crossroads. Between 2000 and 2005, Ireland’s foreign-born population was increasing at an average annual rate of 8.4% and Spain’s at (what follows is not a typographical error) 21.6% a year. …

“There are about 20 million Muslims on the continent, if you count the millions of native Muslims in the Balkans. As noted earlier, there are around 5 million Muslims in France, 4 million in Germany, and 2 million in Britain. Pakistanis and Bengalis predominate in England, Arabs in France, Belgium, and Spain, and Turks in Germany; but Islam in all Western European countries is to some extent a mix of people from all over the Islamic world. The heavy concentration of these populations has the potential to multiply their influence. A million Muslims now live in London, where they make up an eighth of the population. In Amsterdam, Muslims account for more than a third of religious believers, outnumbering Catholics, as well as al the Protestant orders combined. …

“Austria is a good country in which to study the variance in population growth between natives and newcomers. Its immigration has been heavily non-European and it is one of the few countries that includes religion in its census. There, the total fertility rate of Catholics is 1.32 children per woman. It is 1.21 for Protestants and 0.86 for the nonreligious. The total fertility rate for Muslims is 2.34. This divergence may sound unspectacular – after all, American women had higher total fertility rates than that as recently as the Baby Boom – but the effects of such a divergence increase rapidly. According to four demographers from the Vienna Institute of Demography, Islam could be the majority religion among Austrians under fifteen by midcentury; it is probably that Austria as a whole, which was 90% Catholic in the twentieth century, will be under 50% Catholic by the middle of the twenty-first. …

“Americans seeking to understand the impasse in Europe’s integration of its ethnic minorities, particularly its Muslim ones, should look at their own history of race relations as well as their own history of immigration. American immigration has involved – and still does – a fairly predictable process of economic advancement and social assimilation in which old-country customs gradually disappear. Differences between natives and the children of immigrants are often superficial and situational, even when they appear to be profound and cultural. There is occasional friction because there is much contact. The American race problem, on the other hand, grew out of lack of contact between blacks and whites. …The position of Muslims in Europe has more in common with the American race problem …”

“{European minister speaking at a conference about immigrants} “He was very pessimistic His experience with difficult neighborhoods is that the second generation is worse than the first generation and the third is worse than the second.'”

Christopher Caldwell describes the mechanism of immigration into Europe in an interview in the Carolina Journal, April 2016.

“{W}hat’s going on now is you’re seeing some of the problems I noted in kind of a concentrated form. You have a very large immigration coming that started from the war zone in Syria and Iraq. But that now has become sort of a lucrative, people-moving route. And once refugees discover how to move on it, people – guides, who take money from people to help them immigrate into Europe, and negotiate the bureaucracy and stuff – they can do it, too.

“So you now have this massive movement of humanity along this road, leading out of Turkey, across the Ionian Sea, into Greece, and up through former Yugoslavia, and into Austria and Germany. And that route is being followed not just by Iranians and Syrians, but by Pakistanis and Iraqis and Bangladeshis and even Southeast Asians. So you’re getting the same immigration pressures but in a huge, concentrated, fast-moving form. …

“We tend to divide things into the rich and the poor. … {T}he big divide in Europe, as in America, is between people who benefit from the global economy and people who don’t. And if you go to a big city – a big, successful city that’s doing well under the global economy’s terms, like say, Paris – you will find that it’s inhabited by the masters of the universe, as Tom Wolfe used to call them, and immigrants. And so there’s not much room for a middle class in such places. …

“You’ve got half the city, …they mesh into the global economy very nicely. But the rest of the country doesn’t really.”

Conclusions

Warnings were given, but ignored. Now the evidence comes in that Europe has a large and growing minority that will not assimilate. While Europe’s elites remain committed to the breaking and remolding of Europe’s culture – and in denial about its ill effects – popular opposition arises. Since Europe’s elites are united, opposition goes to fringe parties – creating new stresses on Europe’s politics. This could be a historic crash of Europe, self-inflicted folly.

For More Information

Ideas! For some shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon.

“Europe’s Growing Muslim Population” by Pew Research, November 2017. At current rates of immigration and fertility, Muslims will be 14% of Europe’s population by 2050. They do not include conversions. Also see at Pew Research: “Islam and the West: A Conversation with Bernard Lewis.”

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Another powerful book about Europe’s new immigrants

Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam .

See these excerpts: the Introduction and his warning that Europe is too tired to fight, perhaps too tired to live — chapter 13, “Tiredness.”. From the publisher…

“The Strange Death of Europe is the internationally bestselling account of a continent and culture caught in the act of suicide. Douglas Murray takes a step back and explores the deeper issues behind the continent’s possible demise, from an atmosphere of mass terror attacks and a global refugee crisis to the steady erosion of our freedoms. He addresses the disappointing failure of multiculturalism, Angela Merkel’s U-turn on migration, and the Western fixation on guilt. Murray travels to Berlin, Paris, Scandinavia, and Greece to uncover the malaise at the very heart of the European culture, and to hear the stories of those who have arrived in Europe from far away.

“Declining birth rates, mass immigration, and cultivated self-distrust and self-hatred have come together to make Europeans unable to argue for themselves and incapable of resisting their own comprehensive alteration as a society and an eventual end. This sharp and incisive book ends up with two visions for a new Europe – one hopeful, one pessimistic – which paint a picture of Europe in crisis and offer a choice as to what, if anything, we can do next. But perhaps Spengler was right: ‘civilizations like humans are born, briefly flourish, decay, and die.'”