The Case against Muslim Migrants

Apparently, the Biden administration has solved the world’s immigration problem. It has allowed America’s borders to be wide open to fleeing Mexicans and Central American migrants. Naturally, it has put an end to the Trump administration ban on immigrants from certain majority Muslim nations.

We all belong to one big happy humanity, so open the gates wide. Even in Europe, the same policy pertains. The true enemy is not Islam. It is not radical Islam. It is Islamophobia. 

Among those who have fearlessly called out this nonsense is Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Surely, she has earned the right to attack radical Islam. By her reasoning Europeans, in particular, are justifying their policies about Muslim migration by cultivating a certain number of misunderstandings. A mind that wallows in misunderstandings cannot think straight. It is in the process of self-deconstructing.

Some people believe, for example, that unskilled immigrants are needed in the modern economy. You might reflect that pro-immigration activists in America often trot out the same argument:

The first deliberate misunderstanding is the pretence that unskilled immigrants with little formal education are absolutely necessary for advanced economies. With Europe’s shrinking populations and falling fertility rates, the woke and Leftist enablers say, surely no one can argue that enticing young and vibrant people to immigrate is a bad thing. Those terrible xenophobes who fixate on cost/benefit exercises — how much, in monetary terms, immigrants cost society versus how much they contribute — simply don’t get it. Those who point out the large-scale welfare dependency of those immigrants and even of their children a generation later, let alone the emergence of an underclass of ethnic and religious enclaves, are met with cheerful accounts of benefits that cannot be quantified in material terms: the cuisine, attire, sights and sounds of new exotic cultures that locals can now sample at leisure.

In truth, Muslim migrants fail to assimilate. And their children fail to assimilate. Facing this obvious truth, advocates proclaim that we gain a special advantage from being exposed to different cultural habits. What would we do without the chance to savor different cuisines?

Besides, the reason that Muslim nations are disintegrating, thus forcing their people to migrate to the West is that Westerners colonized them. Thus, we are guilty and we must atone for our sins by accepting more Muslims into our midst. If they behave badly, if they mount criminal enterprises, we are paying the price for Western colonialism:

In any case, we’re told, it is our own fault that these societies are falling apart because we colonised them in the first place. Worse, we even profited from the slave trade before and during the colonial years. Here the conclusion of the Misunderstanding Game is made clear: the moral atonement for historical wrongs is more compelling than any rational attempt to analyse the issues on the table.

Hirsi Ali suggests that Muslims are especially prone not to want to assimilate:

Why, for instance, are Lebanese Christians Lebanese more likely to become fully assimilated in Australia than Lebanese Muslims when their circumstances of arrival and departure are practically the same? Or why do Bangladeshi and Pakistani immigrants struggle to integrate in the UK, while their Hindu and Sikh counterparts flourish and, in some cases, even do better than the natives?

But, you will respond, aren’t we all human beings? Don’t we all want the same thing-- which means, in this case, living according to Enlightenment values:

We all want to be free and equal; we all want to abide by the law; we all share the same basic values and we all want to respect the dignity of others. For those of us who are men and women of faith, in the end we all pray to the same God. For those of us who are secular, we are all led by our reason. Save for a subset of misfits — and every society has those — we are all just human beings.

To which Hirsi Ali says that, no, we do not all function according to the same rules:

To this kind of argument, I always have the same response: not everyone’s concept of God is identical. How else would you explain the existence of Islamist sermons of hatred? Or the harassment of women, gays, Jews and others? What would you say to the victims of the Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs or the Muslim girls who are forced into marriage? If we all pray to the “same” God, then what about the knife attacks, the beheadings and the use of trucks as weapons of murder by perpetrators screaming Allahu-Akbar? What about ISIS and Al-Qaeda? Radical views exist and we urgently need to grapple with them.

And if we are all the same, why do so many Muslim groups voluntarily self-segregate?

It is, perhaps, a disappointment to those who have always insisted that we humans are all the same to see so many Muslim groups form organisations and movements with the objective of isolating their communities from the rest of society.

And then there is the argument from European guilt. We all need to atone for the sins of the past, because Western Civilization is not a great human achievement. It is a crime against humanity. Apparently, leftists thinkers and politicians all believe this:

One theory is that there is a genuine desire within the European political elite to atone for the past; today’s leaders don’t want to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors. Another possibility is that Western leaders have simply lost confidence in Western Civilisation. It has all been one long tale of horrors: slavery, oppression, colonialism, genocides, misogyny and massacres. Hence there are no values to protect from large numbers of outsiders and certainly nothing worthwhile to ask immigrants to integrate into. A third explanation is that some European leaders genuinely wish to do away with borders. For them it is a matter of principle and they couldn’t care less who pays the price for the pursuit of a borderless planet.

Hirsi Ali adds another salient point, one that is often overlooked by our great theoretical thinkers. The people running these open-borders policies are often grossly incompetent:

But I believe there is one more reason: incompetence. Quite simply, none of the leaders whose job it is to resolve the issues of Muslim immigration and integration has a clue as to how to go about it. These politicians around the table who do have the right sort of principles but lack the ability to persuade the others. Some grasp the fine details of the issue but are incapable of seeing the big picture. And as with all policy areas of this magnitude and complexity, there are also those leaders who parrot the interests of organised groups who benefit from the status quo.