Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:First of f all, they are closer to the Middle East and are a better target of opportunity.
Secondly, your assumptions are wrong.
They have more immigrants, but they are less successful at integrating them. In the U.S., we expect that the children of Muslim immigrants will be Americans AND Muslim with no contradiction. I had an argument with a German guy about how immigrants to Germany could never really be German and neither could their children. And Germany is probably better at integrating them than other countries.
A lot of Muslim immigrants to Europe are poor. A lot of Muslim immigrants to the U.S. are professionals and business owners. Professionals don't have time for that.
This pp nailed it.
This is something that many people don't realize about the United States. While we still have racism here, our emphasis is on assimilation. We expect immigrants to be part of our society and to live wherever they want. In many European nations, immigrants are expected to remain outside of the mainstream culture, and remain geographically and economically isolated and impoverished in poor suburbs. This breeds anger and alienation. This is one of the reasons we've had fewer problems with terrorism.
That's why it's laughable that Ted Cruz and Donald Trump want patrols in Muslim neighborhoods. Yes, there are some in the United States but most Muslims do not live ghettoized in Muslim neighborhoods. Are they going to send cops around to knock on the doors of the individual Muslim family living down the block?
I'm the PP who you said nailed it. I am flattered, but I don't think you understood what I said, or perhaps I didn't express it clearly. It's not that the emphasis in the US is on assimilation; in fact, there is very blessed little of it. It's that in the U.S., assimilation is
possible. It is possible because to be American, you do not have to look a particular way, worship in a particular way, read certain things, eat certain things etc. As long as you speak English passably, obey the laws and subscribe to a minimal set of common U.S. values, you have a shot at being American, and "mainstream" America expects nothing else of you.
In Europe, the assimilation standards are not achievable because no matter how well one speaks French, one is not and can never become French unless one is born that way. The European cultures are much more demanding of potential Europeans, and Europe is only now asking itself what it really means to be European, because just one generation ago the answer to this question was plain, obvious and cast in stone - you have to be French, Italian etc.
This is complete nonsense. I'm French, born and raised in the Middle East until I moved to France sometime during elementary school, of Muslim ancestry and now living in the US because my husband is American. My family is secular but my parents have always spoken French with a heavy accent and my mother's French is less than polished. We never hid our origins. Nonetheless, we were never, ever made to feel like outsiders because we loved living in France and assimilated willingly and our French friends "de souche" (meaning native born) never cared one way or another--except maybe when they celebrated our awesome Middle Eastern food. To this day my deepest friendships and fondest memories come from my years in France. I consider myself French and I'm teaching our children the language.
The people who commit these atrocities are by and large a bunch of unreformed thugs who have grown up in the ghetto, start as high school dropouts and discover they can't find work as high school drop-outs(duh) in countries that have double digit unemployment rates, start scapegoating the system and find a new source of belonging and inspiration in terrorism, like gang members magnified ten thousand times. France has an unbelievably generous welfare state that supports all residents from cradle to grave without regard to religion (the principle of "laicite", meaning secularism in public affairs is deeply entrenched in the culture). Your idiotic statements do a huge disservice to the nearly six million Muslims in France who consider themselves French, are considered French by others and go about their daily business in an honest and upstanding manner.
It's sort of ironic how your post confirms what I said in so many ways. Let's take it line by line.
First of all, I'm sorry to say, you are not French. You have a French passport and are a French citizen, I assume, but you are most assuredly not French ethnically. You confuse American notions of nationality and citizenship with ethnic identity. If you were born and raised in the Middle East, then unless you were born to the French expatriate family, you are not French ethnically. You can be a French citizen, yes, a member of that society. But you are not a French person and never will be. That dice was cast when you were born.
You say you assimilated willingly. My dear, you started from a place of not holding on to your identity. You clearly do not identify as a Middle Easterner, and if you "assimilated willingly", that means you were eager to shed your Middle Eastern identity. How else to explain that a person born and raised in the Middle East does not relate to the Middle East? Your family is secular so you do not share in pull of Islam. If you come from a family of Lebanese Christians or Armenians (because no one is historically secular in the Middle East), you already have a leg up on assimilation because you and the French share historical religious roots. Are you white? Do you think a dark-skinned, religious Muslim Middle Easterner would easily tread the same road? Yes, I'm sure you still love your kebabs and your baklava, but that's a Disneyland version of the Middle East that doesn't really threaten Europe.
The final irony is that you, a person born and raised in the Middle East, who most assuredly didn't speak French on your mama's knees, are teaching your children French. FRENCH. Not Arabic, not Armenian, not Berber or whatever language you grew up with. Losing your language is the ultimate loss of identity. That you prefer to identify as a French speaker, not an Arabic speaker, tells me you had to turn your back on your Middle Eastern roots behind to feel French. This is not a diss against you; I'm sure you did what you had to do to succeed in France, as did your family. But it is very, very illustrative that in order to do so, you had to stop being Middle Eastern. I'm sure this is very uncomfortable for you to read, and rest assured I don't mean to hurt your feelings, but you have to realize that your version of assimilation is not really assimilation, it's a complete erasure of identity into which you were born. Why did you have to do that to feel that you belong in France?
Why don't French high-school dropouts who can't find jobs turn to terror? I'm sure double-digit unemployment can't all be attributed to the ethnically non-French, can it?
I didn't say that six million Muslims in France don't go about their business in an honest and upstanding manner. Just that there are deep structural reasons why assimilation in Europe is very different from assimilation in the U.S., and that European immigrants walk a very different path from the American immigrants, with very different challenges inherent to societies where identity is ethnically rooted.
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