Wednesday, July 11, 2007

"The case for mistrusting Muslims"   [Mark Steyn]

Theodore Dalrymple, who has lived among Muslims - in Afghanistan and Africa, I mean, not just in France and England - and who said after 9/11 something to the effect that he'd personally rather be in a souk in Tangiers than a strip mall in Jersey, has a very shrewd piece in The Los Angeles Times. I was struck especially by this bit:

The plain fact of the matter is that British society could get by perfectly well without the contribution even of moderate Muslims. The only thing we really want from Muslims is their oil money for bank deposits, to prop up London property prices and to sustain the luxury market; their cheap labor that we imported in the 1960s in a vain effort to bolster the dying textile industry, which could not find local labor, is now redundant. 

In other words, the economic rationale for mass immigration turned out to be bogus: Muslims came in huge numbers to do "the jobs Britons won't do" and be textile workers in northern English towns. Thirty years later, there are no textile mills, but those northern English towns are Muslim.

The economic argument for mass immigration is always reductionist, simply because people do not think of themselves as solely (or even principally) economic entities. The government may see immigrants as textile workers or bus drivers or even neurosurgeons, but what matters is how those individuals see themselves - and as Europe has discovered a significant segment of that population has embraced a core identity unrelated to textile mills, NHS hospitals or any other economic enterprise.

07/11 07:46 AMShare