Europe Ruminates

Here is another piece on Europe's response to the Islamofacists: Stoned to death... why Europe is starting to lose its faith in Islam

Reluctantly, some intellectuals have lately concluded that the model for Europe should be the US. On Tuesday a writer for Libération, the French left-wing daily, noted that immigrants in the US threw themselves into “the American dream” and prospered. “There is no French, Dutch or other European dream,” she noted. “You emigrate here to escape poverty and nothing more."

It is strange that everything comes back to the "melting pot" theory of integration, which is largely discounted (rightly? wrongly?) here in the States. What doesn't seem to be understood is that in many ways first generation immigrants are no different in the U.S. then in Europe. It's in the resulting second and third generations of those immigrants where the differences emerge. There seems to be more of a culture of opprotunity for the children of immigrants in the United States. It is unclear to me if the lives of second or third generation Turkish immigrants in Germany, for example, is substantially different from those of the first generation. Without avenues of cultural and economic mobility you wind up with stagnant sub-classes of immigrants who, though they may have escaped third world poverty, will never quite enjoy first world prosperity.

It does seem that Europe recognizes some of these dificulties (See for example, The Political Economy of Anti-Americanism ), but they may not have the will to impose the necessary corrections.