Beyond Immigration

I’m for ending chain-immigration as well as having a more robust general immigration policy, but it is not clear that the problem of radical jihadism, as demonstrated once again by the bomber in New York yesterday, is mostly attributable to lax current immigration practice. The real problem is more with home-grown radicalization, which ought to trouble us more than lax immigration.

The Pew Research Center released a survey in September showing that American-born Muslims are more likely to dislike America than foreign-born Muslims who immigrate here. This finding is buried way down in the report, below more politically correct findings that muslims don’t care for Trump, and that anti-Muslim sentiments seem to be on the rise. But have a close look at this chart:

The huge gap in the first bar—friendliness toward native-born and immigrant Muslims—is striking, since you’d expect just the opposite. Now ask yourself why the adverse numbers of American-born Muslims should be so much higher than immigrant Muslims? Is it really plausible that Americans somehow prefer new Muslims to ones that have been around a while? I wonder if it might have anything to do with our increasingly anti-American educational institutions? We’re doing a crap job at assimilation—or perhaps we’re assimilating Muslims to precisely the wrong things.

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