According to Welt, such conclusions are contained in the book by American journalist Christopher Caldwell, «Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West» («Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West»). Caldwell, who writes for Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard, has been studying immigration in Europe for more than a decade.
According to the journalist, it is a real revolution caused by mass immigration. The European welfare state is practically threatened with collapse, and European secularism is challenged by Islam. In general, Europe cannot remain Europe if other people already live there, Caldwell concludes.
The decision to invite immigrants, the journalist notes, was made at a difficult time for Europe, after the war, when the continent lay in ruins, both materially and spiritually. Meanwhile, the initiators of such a step thought it was a short-term measure; no one expected a large number of immigrants, believing that exactly enough would arrive to fill the gap created by the losses in the war.
"No one thought that immigrants would ever claim social benefits. The idea that they would bring with them the culture and way of life of their villages, family clans, and mosques seemed absolutely absurd," writes Caldwell. According to the journalist, the fallacy of such a step became clear almost from the very beginning. European heavy industry, for which foreign labor was intended, had already entered a phase of decline at that time.
As a result, many were left without jobs. Christopher Caldwell cites data according to which in German cities, guest workers, particularly Turks, make up 40% of the unemployed. Caldwell considers the argument often put forward by German politicians that immigrants are necessary to maintain the functioning of the social security system to be untenable. To correct the imbalance caused by the aging of Europe's population and falling birth rates, 701 million immigrants are needed—more than the population of Europe, the journalist notes.
In Germany, the number of immigrants increased from 3 million in 1971 to 7.5 million in 2000, but the number of employed remained at 2 million. While in the early 1970s the employed made up 65% of all immigrants, by 1983 the share of employed among them had fallen to 38%. From this, Caldwell concludes that immigrants receive more from the social security system than they contribute.
As for the prospects of immigrant integration, Caldwell is skeptical, and he considers the so-called Islamic conferences held in Germany—consultations between representatives of Muslim communities and local authorities—to be "naive." The fatal mixture of German and pan-European guilt caused by World War II and the colonial past cannot counteract the hypertrophied sense of self-identity among Muslim immigrants.
In his book, Christopher Caldwell quotes the words of German Constitutional Court judge Udo Di Fabio: "Why should this living world culture integrate into Western culture, whose bearers do not produce enough offspring, and which itself no longer possesses any transcendental idea and is moving towards its end?"
Based on materials from Lenta.ru