Our author points out that immigration policies have opened the door for a continuing stream of people in Europe, people who are still arriving. She argues these policies and many European laws have created too easy a haven for them, perhaps even detracting from a truer spirit of Western human rights and refuge. At their worst, such policies do little to prevent immigrants from maintaining their own religious beliefs, cultural practices and languages of origin (often in ghettoes, which is arguably the greatest moral failure here). They also devalue the deeper reasons immigrants come in the first place.
The problem poses a sort of identity crisis for many European societies, as well as many real and serious sources of social and political conflict.
I would argue that our author wants to keep in mind some of the same ideals that Roger Scruton does (marriage, the role of the church, the moral depths of religious thinking) and their influence on the institutions that can maintain those freedoms and reasons.
On that note, Scruton doesn’t necessarily jump into bed with the hard European right (where violent nationalism and racial identity lurk), but he finds the current public sentiment and an excessive multi-culturalism driving public policy and law-making to not be sufficient in handling the problem.
Though continuing further…there is an argument in this article (and in some of Scruton’s thinking) that leads back to religious idealism, and perhaps doesn’t do enough to avoid a confrontation between say…Christian/Jewish religious idealism and Islamic religious idealism.
Addition: I should add that the goal is not to prevent immigrants from maintaining their own religious beliefs, cultural practices, and languages, but to give them good reasons to adopt those of their chosen countries. Some policies may serve the ideological interests of some citizens, but do little to help the actual immigrants integrate. Another fault line where such tension can be observed could be in Sarkozy’s recent statements to ban the full body Muslim garments worn by a few women in public.
See Also On This Site: From YouTube: Roger Scruton On Religious Freedom, Islam & Atheism…Low European Birth Rates In The NY Times: No Babies?
