THE NEW YORK TIMES: LONDON — Europe’s economic crisis has subordinated its other epochal problem — shaping a future life with Muslim immigrants and Islam — into a place where there’s a temptation to pretend it’s vanished.
There are no headlines around Europe these days like the front-page one in New York last weekend, reporting that minorities are hardest hit by real estate foreclosures in the city.
Here, instead, it’s low-level, reflexively standard stuff: a story or two, depending on a newspaper’s basic political take, pointing to encroachments on traditional national habit by Muslim immigrants, or suggesting the state may be over-responding (giving in, according to what you read) to demands for what’s often cast as their separate but equal status parallel to the mainstream.
One story last week was about a Muslim cook who said wearing plastic gloves and using tongs was not enough to protect him from the possibility of being splattered while preparing pork sausages for breakfast. Feeling discriminated against, he sued. Another reported Christians’ concern about the appointment of a Muslim, described as a “controversial” producer who commissioned documentaries with a pro-Islam bias, as chief of religious broadcasting at the BBC.
There are two facts below the surface here.
The first says that Europe is not paying much attention and certainly not talking about how its Great Recession is affecting the stability of the communities of vulnerable, largely unskilled Muslim immigrants who make up an increasing proportion of Europe’s cities.
Among Europe’s existential concerns, immigration does not come under the common policy control of the European Union. That frequently leaves individual countries hiding from neighbors’ problems concerning issues they can’t resolve themselves.
And it underpins a flight from solidarity, effective action, and often, Europe’s shared reality. Not ideal.
The second fact is that on the level of daily experience, an increasing number of white Europeans believe Muslim immigrants want integration with an asterisk — the asterisk providing an all-access pass to the welfare state, but with a mark-the-box list of opt-outs or variances from many of its obligations.
The predicament now is that as economic realities harshen, implying more stress and tension for (and emanating from) its newcomers, Europe seems no better prepared or certain about what needs to be done. >>> By John Vinocur | Monday, May 18, 2009
