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05/20/2009: "An American's view of immigration to Europe offers a bracing counter-argument to the prevailing liberal orthodoxy"
Mass immigration into Europe in the past 50 years has profoundly changed the continent and is likely to change it even more over the next half century. Yet it is a subject so immersed in fear and wishful thinking that it often seems we still don’t have a proper language in which to discuss it.
It is partly for this reason that Christopher Caldwell's new book, with the melodramatic title Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, will seem rather shocking to some readers of this newspaper. For he asks some unusually direct questions: can you have the same Europe with different people? Why did mass immigration happen when so few people actually wanted it? Immigrants want a better life but how many of them want a European life? Why is minority ethnic pride a virtue and European nationalism a sickness? Is political correctness just fear masquerading as tolerance?
As you can tell from those questions, the book is a sustained attack on the well-meaning liberalism that is still the dominant note in official immigration debates. Yet although Caldwell, a conservative American, believes that European immigration has not been a success, at least for the host societies, he is not anti-immigrant and says that he is a great supporter of the American melting pot. The book, or most of it, is written with the bemused but decent "native" European in mind.
[ Good to see that a book demonstrating the immigration crisis in Europe is given such a positive review in a paper famous for its Leftist bias. ]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/17/christopher-caldwell-immigration-islam