05/12/2007
Father Richard Neuhaus is talking about Philip Jenkins’s book on the Islamization of Europe, God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis:
But the growth of Islam in Europe today has causes different from an ongoing struggle against Christianity. Jenkins offers an extended discussion under the title “The Empires Come Home.” France, Britain, and the Netherlands ruled empires with large Muslim populations and, with decolonization, the idea that these peoples were citizens of the empire entitled them to a place in “the home country.”
There was also the desperate economic need for workers. “The forces driving Muslim immigration were so overwhelming that there is no reason to imagine the conspiracy theory devised by Bat Y’eor and since popularized by Oriana Fallaci and others, which suggests that European elites collaborated with Arab states to create a Eurabian federation spanning the Mediterranean. Given the economic forces demanding labor and the political factors conditioning supply, it would be difficult to imagine any outcome much different from what actually occurred. In the United States, similarly, any significant relaxation of immigration laws would inevitably have drawn in millions of Mexican workers, regardless of what any government or private cabal planned or desired.”
(One notes in passing that the influx of millions of illegal immigrants from Mexico is not a hypothetical about what might have happened but a massive fact on the ground.)The Much Exaggerated Death of Europe by Richard John Neuhaus First Things (May 2007)
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