Creeds and Bloodlines

Walter Russell Mead adds this to the discussion of Europe’s problems:

That’s unfortunate, not least because Europe really does have immigration and assimilation problems—as the immigrants, who often face discrimination, experience alienation, and are shut out from many of the guarantees of European life, will tell you themselves. (See this excellent Patrick Weil piece from the TAI archives on life in the banlieues, for example.) Europe writ large has not found a way to offer its immigrant populations the same opportunities given to “natives” (a distinction that often stretches to the second or third generation), but at the same time it has been largely unwilling to decrease the volume of immigrants or discuss new measures for integrating them.

America has some answers to offer from our experience as the “melting pot,” but they’re not as simple as we often like to tell ourselves. As Reihan Salam recently pointed out, our assimilation of the massive “Second Wave” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (one of the most successful such endeavors in history) involved a heated national conversation, decades of assimilation efforts that bordered on indoctrination, and the effective banning of immigration for two generations. But the end result was something that pretty much everyone could live with: the acceptance of the once heavily contested idea that you could be both ethnically Irish and patriotically American, or an observant Jew and patriotically American, or (as they will tell you in Dearborn, Michigan) Muslim-American.

The countries of Europe’s problems may be even deeper depending on the degree to which their systems are actuarially dependent on not treating their immigrants (unto the third generation) the way they treat “natives”. Additionally, as George Friedman pointed out, echoing Chesterton’s observation that America is not a country founded on a bloodline but on a creed.