More on Immigration and Europe

More on Immigration and Europe:

The National Interest has a piece that suggests that Europe is necessarily becoming more Islamic... but, as a tradeoff, the near Islamic world is becoming more like Europe. (H/t: Arts & Letters Daily).

That is the conclusion; but the argument looks at differences in how the various parts of Europe, especially Britain and France, got where they are today. Here is an interesting passage.

THE IMPERIAL experience serves as a backdrop to the markedly contrasting ways that London and Paris have approached the immigration dilemma. France has created an intermingled culture, which is being forged on a daily basis between the native Gaul and the immigrant Arab and Berber. It revolves around two French obsessions: the bed and the dinner table. Your average young Muslim girl is interested in living and having children with a French gouer, a North-African colloquial term meaning “infidel”—i.e., non-Muslim. (Gouer is itself a corruption of the classical Arabic kuffar, used in immigrant slang to designate a French native. They are also known as fromage, or “cheese”—ironically the same synecdoche that was used in the neocon-coined “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.”) These women would loathe the very idea of an arranged marriage to a fellah (peasant) cousin from the far away bled (North Africa) with his unrefined manners and pedestrian French. By the same token, the most popular national dish of France—the country of gastronomy par excellence—regularly confirmed by opinion polls, is couscous, the semolina-based traditional dish of North Africa, now fully assimilated by French palates.

There's something of the same thing going on with us and Mexico, although that is more to our advantage than this may be to Europe's. Salsa has surpassed ketchup as our favorite condiment. How much does that show that we are becoming more like Mexico? Does it go any distance at all to showing that Mexico is becoming more like us?

Yet read on; there are some interesting arguments about the history of British and French colonialism, and their consequences for how modern Islamic immigration interacts with those states.