Assimilation and Immigration

Would you assimilate, if you were a migrant?

At last month’s CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) in Hungary, Dutch activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek opened her speech with a powerful statement: She summarized a handful of crimes which made the European headlines in the previous four days. Namely: The stabbing of three elderly women on the streets of Stockholm, riots in Paris led by hundreds of Afghan migrants, a mass stabbing in London, and the destruction of a church in the Bringolo, France, caused by a mysterious fire. The Parisian riots seem to have been triggered by a murder-suicide case involving an Afghan migrant, for which other migrants were quick to blame police. The other infractions are less clear in their motivations. What is clear of such incidents is that the perpetrators are probably not well-integrated members of society. In fact, it is increasingly likely that the perpetrators of such crimes – which happen more frequently than ever in major European cities – are directly linked to exploding immigration levels.

I use the word “integrated” because “assimilation” is no longer in vogue. Assimilation is considered too high a demand to place on immigrants, especially those whose cultures and languages are markedly different from those of their new home. Since any form of cultural conditioning is out of the question, the vague hope of “integrating” immigrants belonging to different cultures into a mythic melting pot now dominates rhetoric on the Left, Center, and even the alleged Right in countries like the UK.

Those who champion open borders crudely assume that integration is guaranteed since the migration is voluntary. But the reality of recent mass immigration into Europe from regions such as North Africa and the Indian subcontinent is neither assimilation nor integration, even when you hand migrants their welfare checks and subsidized housing. It is volitional segregation. This, to be clear, is perfectly natural and inevitable. Of course migrants look for extant communities in which they can communicate easily, eat familiar food, and live alongside family members and friends who have also relocated! More importantly, it’s natural to resist changing your core values to adhere to cultural norms which your new society considers unusual or wrong (like cousin marriage, which is at around 60% in the Pakistani diaspora, Islamic gender and family roles, or outright illegal practices like female genital mutilation). To assimilate would be to erase your own culture upon relocation. Who among us would choose to do such a thing if we had another option? 

Since assimilation of one culture into a completely alien other is unlikely to happen without force, “integration” is the liberal elite’s only hope (or rather, pipe dream). But, since enclaves naturally form in liberal host countries, integration doesn’t just magically happen either. As I have discussed in this essay, Islamic cultures around the world actively hold Western “decadence” in contempt; this attitude doesn’t just disappear when migrants, especially fighting-age men, move abroad to improve their economic prospects. When political turmoil brews in the Middle East, as it has for the past two generations, Islamists easily infiltrate and plot against the very countries which provide shelter and jobs to many communities of Muslims – communities which Islamists successfully target. This is why, as of 2020, the UK’s MI5 has over 40,000 suspects on a terror watchlist, the vast majority of which are related to extremist Islamist terrorism. 

Terrorism is not the main problem, though. As Vlaardingerbroek points out, immigration is related to crime more generally. I have discussed sex crimes and their relationship to migration in my book Prey, but other forms of crime like the violence described above – especially gang-related violence like shootings, which have more than doubled in the last decade in Sweden – are also skyrocketing. The urban situation in Europe has worsened to such an extent over the last decade that it requires willful ignorance to deny the causal relationship between demographic disruption and the degradation of law and order.

But willful ignorance is the order of the day: Over the last 14 years the British Tory Party, addicted to cheap foreign labor, has done nothing to honor their promises to secure the borders. Urban crime is always blamed on vague ailments like deprivation or alienation, with no mention of cultural differences. See this recent Parliamentary debate on refugee integration, in which failure to ‘integrate’ is blamed on the amount of money the government throws at asylum seekers and other undocumented migrants upon arrival.

Assimilation is unnatural, hard, and we wouldn’t want to do it either. From this it follows that the kind of immigration which requires assimilation, or cultural conditioning, to preserve harmony is not ideal. It also follows that, when assimilation is too demanding on immigrants, integration is not the plausible alternative it is often framed to be. Segregation, ghettoization, and unrest are the reality. Western states refuse to compromise with these facts at their own peril.