Jacob Laksin reviews Christopher Caldwell’s diagnosis of Europe’s immigration woes, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe:
In Caldwell’s account, mass immigration in Europe was predicated on several assumptions, nearly all of them false. Needing cheap labor to fuel their expiring postwar industrial economies, Europeans assumed that the immigrants they turned to would be temporary; that they would not qualify for welfare; and that those who remained would assimilate and shed the cultural mores and habits of their home countries. The Europeans were wrong on all counts. When its textile mills and factories closed in the sixties and seventies, Europe was left with a vast, imported underclass with one tenuous link to its adopted countries: the welfare payments on which it had come to rely.The demographic transformation was profound. Europe has always had immigration, but the scale of its midcentury influx was without precedent. And one group led the way. In the middle of the twentieth century, there were practically no Muslims in Europe; today, it is estimated, there are about 20 million, including 5 million in France, 4 million in Germany, and 2 million in Britain. Equally dramatic was the change in immigrants’ economic fortunes. In the sixties and seventies, Germany’s Turkish migrant workers actually boasted higher labor-force participation than native Germans did. Today, unemployment in Germany’s Turkish community tops 40 percent—three times the national unemployment rate. Nor is Germany an outlier. Some 40 percent of Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands are on welfare, Caldwell reports, as are two-thirds of French imams.