9/11, Europe, and the fight over immigration

0:00Welcome to Hub headlines. Today's program features Patrick Luciani, writer and book reviewer for the Hub, writing on how 9-11 shaped Europe's ongoing debate over Islam and immigration. In the weeks after September 11, 2001, Orianna Filosi, the world acclaimed Italian journalist living in New York City who saw the twin towers collapse, wrote The Rage in the Pride. The book read like a scream enraged by the violence of that day. It was an instant bestseller throughout Europe. She believed Europe faced an existential threat from Islam and was angry that no one was paying attention, except the European left, who were enraged by her book. For full disclosure, I got to know Fallacy in the last year of her life before she died in 2006. Fallacy's book wasn't about numbers. She feared that a confident fertile Islam was quickly moving into a continent that had

1:01quietly stopped believing in its own history and survival. And a culture that has stopped insisting on itself doesn't need to be outnumbered to disappear. Before that September morning, Europe's Muslim populations were discussed, when they were discussed at all, as a labor market and integration question. Then the violence compounded. Madrid in 2004, London in 2005, followed by two decades of steady European jihadist attacks, including to name just a few, the Charlie Hebdo murders, and the vicious beheading of Samuel Patte, a middle school teacher in France. By 2012, it had hardened into a full literature. Mark Stein, Christopher Caldwell, Douglas Murray, historians Bernard Lewis and Nile Ferguson, novelist Michel Wellbeck, and those who started to call Europe, Eurebia, all arguing some version of Fallacy's thesis that projected a Muslim majority Europe was on the horizon. That was the target of Douglas Saunders, a globe and male columnist whose 2012 book The

2:06Myth of the Muslim Tide took aim. His method was the opposite of Fallacies, data and surveys instead of fury. He argued that Muslim fertility runs high in the first immigrant generation and converges toward the native rate by the third. The same curve every immigrant wave in modern history has followed, including Catholics and Jewish immigration in Europe and North America. The Tide was a myth because Tides recede, and on the numbers Saunders argued, this one was always going to plateau. His thesis was calm, reasoned, and persuasive, especially to ears that supported open immigration. He was also optimistic with caveats, of course, that Muslim integration in European society would improve, including a reduction in extremism. It was an optimistic book with a, don't worry, be happy sort of vibe. Saunders showed that even with high Muslim fertility rates and continued moderate immigration, Muslims would come nowhere near a substantial minority, or least of all, a majority of Europe's

3:10population by 2050. This was right to call the Eurebia thesis a myth, and it remains one if numbers are all that count. Based on this reasoning and a strong sense of moral responsibility, Angela Merkel made the right decision to allow one million refugees, most fleeing the Syrian civil war, to Germany in 2015. But the national number is exactly where his arithmetic goes soft, because averages hide what actually drives politics. Immigration never spread evenly across any country. It clustered around cities such as Marseille, estimated at a quarter to over 30% Muslim. Brussels and Malmou at a fifth to a quarter, and Birmingham, Bradford, Blackburn, and Luton in a similar range between 30 and 35%. The British government is now trying to spread immigrants more evenly throughout the country, realizing that too much concentration brings its own problems of integration. This where a body of research saunders never engages becomes relevant.

4:14Politics and the political science of tipping points. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Shelling formalized the concept in 1971. A majority isn't required for communities or societies to change. Recent research finds that a group holding roughly a quarter of a population can flip a prevailing norm through persuasion alone. But plainly, influence over a shared political culture doesn't require a majority, and it can arrive well before 50%. Something like that is already underway in Europe's densest immigrant cities, or even here on our continent in places like Dearborn, Michigan. It just never shows up in national data, because a national chart is built to average it away. That's not the Arabian thesis. Nobody credible is projecting a majority Muslim Europe. The right-wing populist, anti-immigrant AFD party in Germany didn't win in Saxony Anhalt in the election last Sunday because of local demographic change, but because of national anxiety about it.

5:14Which is the real point. Saunders assumed that diffusing the demographic panic with numbers would calm the politics built on it. It didn't. The optimism for better integration and reduced extremism has proven harder to achieve, especially with rising crime rates in Muslim communities in Oslo and Stockholm. Even the British government thought it necessary to hand out brochures to recent male immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, reminding them that rape was a crime. Twenty-five years on from the event that started the clock on 9-11, European politics has been transformed mainly because of immigration. Georgia Maloney governs Italy and has built part of her public identity on invoking philosophy. Depends national rally topped the first round of France's 2024 legislative elections. And now the AFD is polling as Germany's strongest party nationally. None of this required the Muslim tide to be real. It required only that enough voters believed something like it was coming.

6:14And of course, scenes such as more than 70,000 Moroccans breaking into Suda, Spain, this July and August, or boatloads of young Muslim men washing up on British shores, don't help the image that all is under control. Saunders treated the tide thesis as a factual claim to be refuted with better data. For a large share of its audience going back to the week, fallacy sat down to write in 2001, it was never really a factual claim. It was a values claim about sovereignty and who gets to decide what a country becomes, wearing demographic language as a disguise. You can win the arithmetic and still lose the argument because the argument was never about arithmetic. fallacy understood that instinctively, in fury, before anyone had taken a poll. The fear she was channeling didn't need to be statistically precise. It needed to feel true to people watching their cities and their politics change faster than anyone in charge could explain. And a quarter century later, in a state parliament in eastern Germany, it still does.

7:16And just as in the US, where Democrats refused or were unable to control their borders, the task of stemming the flow of what the literature euphemistically calls, irregular immigration, will now be finished by the darker forces of populism. That's it for today's edition of Hub Headlines. We hope you enjoyed the program. Hub Headlines is produced by Alicia Rao. This program was narrated by automated voices. Thanks for listening.