MAIL ONLINE: Are Britain and Europe being swamped, overrun, defeated by a wave of mostly Muslim immigrants and their descendants? Or are Europe's ethnic problems the figment of a febrile political imagination - something created by racism, dishonesty and manipulation by extremist parties such as the BNP? Those are not the only two possibilities, of course, although a lot of people behave as if they are.
Both sides will take lots of fodder for their arguments from a study released last week by the highly reliable Pew Forum On Religion And Public Life. According to the report, there are now 1.6billion Muslims, a quarter of the world's population.
And they are distributed in surprising ways - there are more Muslims in Germany than in Lebanon, for example. Recent projections by the British Government show the population rising to 71 million within 20 years, due mainly to migration.
But Europe's (and Britain's) problems with Muslim migration are not mostly demographic. The Pew study shows the world's Christian population is growing too, to 2.25 billion.
It is possible, though, to have grave problems with immigration that do not involve either the wipe-out of a culture or the disappearance of a population.
Europe opened the door to mass immigration in the Fifties and discovered - as the United States did before it - that it is impossible to open that door just a fraction. Immigration, though intended as a solution to a short-term labour crisis, has become, without anyone particularly wanting it to be, a permanent feature of the landscape.
One of the most amazing statistics in the history of European immigration is that the number of foreign residents in Germany rose steadily between 1971 and 2000 - from three million to about 7.5million - but the number of employed foreigners did not budge. It stayed rock-steady at around two million.
Multi-ethnic societies can be good societies. But the transition puts a strain on institutions, on trust in government, and on a sense of identity.
Not every society makes that transition successfully. In my book, Reflections On The Revolution In Europe, I tried to describe how this process is working - or, more often, not working.
Revolution is not too strong a word. It well describes what occurred in America between 1840 and 1925, when millions of Catholic immigrants arrived, transforming a largely Protestant society.
The need to accommodate them made the United States replace one kind of society with another. We may like the result, but it would have been absurd to expect those born into pre-immigrant 19th Century America to rejoice at the disruption.
However, the transition has given America an edge in the present era of mass migrations. That is not America's only advantage, of course. The 'tone' of current US immigration is set by various Latin American cultures; that of European immigration is set by various Muslim cultures.
The cultural peculiarities of Latin-American immigrants generally appear to Americans as antiquated versions of their own. >>> Christopher Caldwell, Author of Reflection on the Revolution in Europe | Sunday, October 11, 2009
