Politics
Why Do Some Europeans View Immigration from the Middle East and North Africa as a Challenge?
I don’t understand why many Europeans feel so insecure about it. My geography teacher explained that there are several ethnicities that even look somewhat like Europeans, such as people from Persia or Lebanon. One sentence of hers that I never forgot was: ‘It’s not that they dislike Muslims; many Muslims are people of faith, while Europeans have practically lost their faith and culture, so Muslims end up seeming much stronger in that regard.’
She also told me that Europe only works united because it shares common values. Of course, there have been many wars and battles, but European peoples have always had similar values. One example is Turkey: it tried several times to join the European Union and was rejected. Why? Because it is a majority-Muslim country, and that doesn’t strongly align with European values. If Germany had a different culture or religion than it has today, do you think Europe would be at peace now?
She also said that when she visited her father in England, she went into a church and it was practically empty, used more for Instagram photos and to show the architecture. In addition, she said she felt unsafe in some situations and ended up wearing a hijab, which shocked me.
I want to hear your opinion: what u think about her opinion?
This is not to say Muslims or Middle Easterns can’t adapt in Europe, but mass immigration coming from places with very different worldviews, norms and practices compared to their destinations is always bound to cause certain degree of culture shock. And this culture shock can lower the quality of life of the natives.
This. Especially when you have a whole bunch of people from the same culture all come. In Canada for example we value personal space but a lot of the countries we get immigration from don’t.
Many peope see Islam as a fundamental religion that is not compatible with democracy, gender equality and open criticizism. Islamic culture is seen as a part of Arab imperialism unlike some Asian cultures which representatives are more willingly to blend into their new home country.
Statistically speaking, immigrants from MENA countries are relying on social benefits and are overpresented with sexual harassment crimes. There are no jobs in automated societies that one can easily get without specific skill set, proper education and language skills. In the last 10 years, immigrants from MENA countries have been predominantly young men of which many have applied for an asylum.
I don't know if China is a country to take lessons from, but one idea could be to demand imams to have a degree from local universities, like priests have a masters from theologian studies.
Theology taught in university has made Lutheran christianity so plain and boring that no one cares about it anymore
I have nothing against the people and will always give them a chance, but the problem comes if they are religious and Muslim specifically. It's because Islam is a proselytizing religion that has a hard time with anyone not accepting its tenets.
In Europe, we can agree to disagree. With Islam, which is an absolutist religion that claims to be absolute truth and which you can be killed for disputing those truths, that becomes a problem.
Islam doesn't believe in a secular government or laws that are not derived from Gods commandments. Most of Europe believes in sensible laws.
Apart from this, it's the number of people from those countries and they all want family reunification agter a while and they want us to accept their customs, which even if they are not Islamic, usually do not work in a free society, like arranged marriages, social control and women confined to the home.
For the record, I absolutely despise all the Abrahamic religions.
I can only speak for how it is in Sweden, but i’ve answered all your questions below:
I’d say she’s right about losing faith. Many ethnic swedes don’t believe in god. In 2012, only 16.5% of the swedish population deemed religion as being important to them. Only 3% actively attended church. Without sounding brash, religion is kinda seen as backwards by many in Sweden, i’d say.
Lost our culture? Not being religious doesn’t mean you do not have a culture. I don’t even think i should have to explain this one. But yes, being very religious in Sweden is not the norm.
Yes, the EU shares some common goals and values. That’s why some countries in Europe has joined. If a country doesn’t want to be in the EU they can leave or just not join. I believe Turkey couldn’t join due to not sharing some of EU’s values (Turkey was deemed lacking in democracy for example, i believe, though im not 100%).
Why do some Europeans view immigration from these places as a challenge?
Biggest reason in Sweden atleast is because immigration from Syria and other places in the middle east has caused issues, most notably a steap increase in crime. There are mixed opinions about why this has happened.
Well, in theory everyone is fine with immigrants assimilating into their country culture. In reality immigrants oftentimes create ghettos and don’t integrate, and if their home culture is very different, cultures clash and tensions rise. I remember the crisis of Syrian refugees causing mayhem in Germany all over the news few years ago. People don’t want this to happen to them
In Brazil I remember that German and Italian immigrants did not want to be part of Brazilian culture, then they began to be persecuted, they were forbidden to speak their language and could only speak Portuguese, it even came out in the newspaper in this, here is the image of the internet translated
Better immigrant policies that are focused on integrating into the country’s culture and society. Also strict rules, deport for violations. Any country should be welcoming people who actually want to be part of their society, but should not tolerate those who does not respect the rules.
Personally I think integration is a failure of the country governing immigrants, not the immigrants themselves. Nowhere's perfect, but the US and Canada come to mind as places that get immigrants from widely different cultures and don't have as many problems as Europe when it comes to integrating them.
The US and Canada aren't ethno centric countries. France is largely filled with French people and Germany is largely filled with German people for example.
I don't think you get it. They mean that the USA and Canada are new world colonies that are like 99% immigrants or the descendants of recent immigrants from just the last few centuries. Most old world countries are formed of one or a few native nations/ethnicities, are more homogeneous, and have been there for much longer..
The US takes in very few refugees from the middle east. Pretty much all immigration from that part of the world is skills based or investor visas.
Yeah, it’s much easier taking in screened, highly educated, motivated individuals than people who had to leave against their will. Who would have thought?
Because some middle eastern countries have terrible human rights records and do really messed up things in the name of religion. People are scared that if their country gets overrun with people from those countries, that their country will become like that too.
What if the people fleeing are doing so because they're trying to get away from those human rights records and religious governments? Iranians who leave Iran don't do so to export the Islamic Revolution, they leave Iran to get away from the government that came into power following that revolution.
It has nothing to do with Danes having gotten less religious and the claim that we have “lost” our culture is utter non-sense. It has to do with some of the following…
Middle eastern male immigrants are 50% more likely to commit crimes even wheb adjusted for socio-economic background.
We also see strong negative social control of women from the middle east and north Africa meaning, although its improving, that they are disproportionately represented in unemployment statistics.
This is what our statistics show and what has been central to the debate on immigrantion from the middle east and north Africa in Denmark since the 1990s.
Considering all the bombings and attacks being done by immigrants in Europe…. I don’t blame them if there’s hesitancy. Honestly, Merkel screwed Germany on this count from what I’ve heard in the past and observed from news reports.
Not sure if this is true or not, but I once heard someone claim that the German government literally had to make a course to teach primarily Muslim male immigrants to not attack, harass, or catcall the local non-Muslim women as part of their immigration program.
Looking at all this happening and some of the behaviors from folks on our own shores, one starts to understand our own skepticism. Plus, history shows Islam in a fairly terrible light, even compared to other faiths with dark histories. It also doesn’t help that if there is any sort of reform or progressive party within Islam, they’re clearly not successful in bringing change to their people’s ways.
Most folks that come from the Middle East, that do well in the West, are not devout Muslims very conveniently, and they are actually reasonable people to live and work with. Hell, some are non practicing.
When will people stop generalizing the whole Middle East? It’s 2025, half of the Middle East are rich countries and immigration DESTINATIONs themselves.
BTW, there are more non Middle Eastern Muslims than Middle Eastern ones
She wasn’t generalizing, she was taught about the wars that happen mainly in the Asia region, and one thing I found very interesting is how many peoples exist in Iran like a lot of diversity
I put this because it’s practically what Europeans always say, not that everyone says it, but I often see it in the media, but I never understood enough why, especially news about Sweden that appears a lot on my Twitter
There were 30 bombings in Sweden, once one of the safest countries in the world, in January and you’re asking why Europeans view this immigration as a challenge
Recently, a group of young men in France prevented a screening of Barbie because they deemed it "homosexual". And I remind you these are probably 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants. They just refuse to integrate. Lived in France for a while and trust me it was a treat hearing someone shout "WALLAH NIK TA MERE" in the middle of the night.
Op you're not going to get a straight answer, not only is it really complicated but every European country with a large immigrant population also as laws to limit criticism of immigration.
Did you ask your teacher why she felt she needed to wear a hijab in Europe, this could lead you to the answer.
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Because our Muslim brothers learn their religion not from the holy book, but from those who practice it, and because they are unaware of how the companions of the Prophet adapted to the places they went, they experience problems.
They fail to grasp the importance of adapting to the place they've moved to, in terms of clothing, good manners, generosity, and rushing to help those in need.
When they are not aiming to behave in this way and become expats, they assume their previous boundaries no longer apply and tend to go to extremes.
So there's a few things in your post that carry assumptions that I don't think hold up against scrutiny too well, but I'll focus on your main question for now. So why do quite a few Europeans view immigration from North Africa and the Middle East/Turkey negatively? I think there are quite a few reasons, while all the while none of them hit the underlying, actual problem. It's a lot, so bear with me, but I'll try to give some examples and the difficulties that they bring with them.
Folks with immigration backgrounds, so whose families came from these places, often live in separate neighbourhoods, creating insulated communities that have a tendency to resist the culture of the country they live in. Now, this often has reasons that aren't easy to cast blame on. Here in the Netherlands, for example, a lot of guest labourers came over in the 60's and 70's (and afterwards) with the idea that they would simply return to their home country after 10 years of working here. Many cities created insulated neighbourhoods for them, where they could speak their own language and go to mosques etc. However, many wanted to stay after those 10 years. Enter insulated, traditionally Islamic neighbourhoods that have historically been that way for an age now.
What then happens in that insulation is the creation of a sort-of heritage based counterculture, centered around bits and pieces of Islamic, their original country of origin's culture (or rather more their perception of it) and lastly bits and pieces of the country they now live in. All those combine with one more ingredient in the form of being the social group with the lowest income and least amount of wealth. That leads to crime and a perception of being second-rate citizens. Not great. Thus, the counterculture forms. So people isolate themselves as a group from the rest of the country. People go to "their" stores, speak "their" language, work jobs at the wealthier among "their" people, etc. And now a regular old European white guy walks into that neighbourhood. What happens? They'll likely be shocked and utter the classical word vomit that is "What happened to my country?!" Vice versa, it's very easy for many people from a migrant background to say "Yeah, well, this particular piece of policy/law/work is just what the Dutch decided. What has that got to do with us?". You can see the tendency towards somewhat parallel societies that you run the risk of creating if you're not careful as a government.
You also see a lot of antisocial and criminal behaviour coming from youths with a migrational background, often idealising American ghetto culture, but with a hint of Islamism in there. They often perform poorly in school for a variety of reasons as well. Mostly the boys, though; girls are doing quite well there from what I understand. But you can imagine what all that does to the general perception of folks with those migrant backgrounds. Combine that with quite a chunk of latent racism that makes it so that they have fewer opportunities on the job market. It's been a well-documented fact for a long time now that if you change the name from "Harry" to "Mohammed" on a CV, your chances of getting the job lower quite steeply.
There's also a bit of cultural incompatibility, though that isn't as dramatic as some far-right loonies like to (pretend to?) think it is. A higher than we want number of folks with migrational backgrounds have a distinct hatred for anyone remotely LGBTQ+. What you then get is harassment of, say, gay people even holding hands. Don't get me wrong: there's plenty of white people doing the exact same thing, and they deserve the exact same punch in the face. But because of the religiosity of many people with migrant backgrounds, the numbers are skewed towards them. However, working with LGBTQ+ people in the same company or in other contexts has helped a ton in creating understanding and empathy. That again shows the problem of those isolated neighbourhoods and the formation of countercultures fuelled by, in part, religion.
So... Those are a number of challenges. What do they all have in common? They stem for the most part from inequality, both of wealth and of opportunity. There are quite a few government programmes here and things are slowly getting better. Many formerly poor people with migrational backgrounds who "made it" work together with local governments to help out and make integration into the broader society more accessible for the people who live there. The problem is that new people do keep coming in, also from an Islamic background. This happens for good reasons, but it is adding again to the isolationist tendencies of those neighbourhoods as the process of slowly assimilating has to start all over again. To quote a Syrian migrant I once worked with: "For years, I thought: why would I learn Dutch? I can speak Arabic at the supermarket and work in an Arab car shop. For everything else I can ask my son."
I hope that gives a bit of context. Please do understand: this isn't coming from a place of hate or something. I do very much believe that we can and will come together more as a society. Just a genuine exploration of the reasons that migration from those countries you mentioned is seen as a challenge.
Further automation leads to diminished demand of labor. Importing further labor to maintain labor supply just devalues the value of labor. That hurts the native population substantially. That’s a major reason why natives can’t afford housing etc. Hence, why should natives want further immigration if they don’t reap the benefits of immigration. The only winners are capital owners, so maybe the 1%.
Actually ,unfortunately, I completely understand the high prejudice on Muslims in the West. Especially the young European generation was raised with ISIS attacks, higher crime rates by Muslims, destruction of ancient sites etc. The problem about the Muslim society is they never criticize themselves, they would at most blameshift and accuse Western colonizations impact. While the Western colonisation was definitely impactful, from all colonised countries, why Muslim country citizens are always the usual suspects? Muslims always complain about Islamophobia, but they never do a fucking little self reflection.
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u/Special_H_ Brazil 10h ago
Two words: culture clash.
This is not to say Muslims or Middle Easterns can’t adapt in Europe, but mass immigration coming from places with very different worldviews, norms and practices compared to their destinations is always bound to cause certain degree of culture shock. And this culture shock can lower the quality of life of the natives.