Immigrate

Irshad Manji, author of The Trouble With Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith discusses the surprising attitude of Muslims and immigrants talking about American cultural policy for immigration, and how Swartzeneggar had it all wrong when he talked about "closing the boarders:"

Non-Muslim Europeans wonder: When filmmaker Theo van Gogh can be killed in the streets of Amsterdam, targeted because he criticized Islam, and when a Muslim woman who has abandoned her arranged marriage can be shot dead by her brothers in Berlin, what's next? And who's next?

If they don't wish to be among us, goes the common complaint, why come here at all?

To which the immigrants respond: We want to integrate, but not assimilate. And the way to integrate is to secure jobs, pay our taxes, finance unemployment insurance, hospital beds, pensions — all the things you Europeans desperately need because of your own low birthrates, aging populations and expectation of material comforts. In short, our contract with you is to keep the welfare state intact without losing our sense of self. If you recognized all that we can contribute, then we wouldn't need to express rage at a society that demonizes us. Now give us work instead of flak.

With identities threatened on both sides, the most frantic voices have gained traction. Some politicians in the Netherlands want a moratorium on immigration, proclaiming their country "full up." It's a small piece of land (unlike California), so I can see why so many Dutch feel saturated and frustrated by people who put the fear of God into their otherwise happily humanist souls.

Meanwhile, Muslim leaders cry racism and plead to journalists like me, "Do you see why we feel driven into the arms of fundamentalists?"

It doesn't take long before I hear something else from European Muslims: This wouldn't happen in America. We would belong in the United States.

As incredible as that sounds in the era of the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay, dozens of Muslims in Western Europe have told me that the U.S. has a genius for inclusion because of how it treats social status. To the question, "Can you earn status rather than be born into it?" America still answers "yes."

Given their hunger to achieve, Americans are disposed to jostling with the "other," and they expect the "other" to jostle right back. What makes someone a real American is not so much his color or faith as his willingness to compete. Just ask the South Asian and Chinese immigrants who made up one-third of Silicon Valley's scientists and engineers during the dot-com craze.

More here.