June 22, 2008

Professor Noah Feldman

The following article, The new pariahs?, written by Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman, was published in the New York Times Magazine on June 22, 2008.

No country is wholly free of anti-immigrant prejudice, whether it is the United States, where illegal immigration was a hot-button issue in the Republican primaries, or post-apartheid South Africa, where economic migrants were recently burned to death. But in many Western European countries today, something new and insidious seems to be happening. The familiar old arguments against immigrants — that they are criminals, that their culture makes them a bad fit, that they take jobs from natives — are mutating into an anti-Islamic bias that is becoming institutionalized in the continent’s otherwise ordinary politics.

Examples abound. The Swiss People’s Party sponsors ads in which three white sheep push one black sheep off the Swiss flag — and wins 29 percent of the vote. In Belgium, the Vlaams Belang deploys a clever variation, publicly praising Jews and seeking their support against Muslims, whom it tellingly describes as “the main enemy of the moment.” Meanwhile, the Dutch politician Geert Wilders calls Islam “the ideology of a retarded culture.”

Even Britain, which has afforded Muslims a more welcoming environment, has had some worrying moments. A few years back, a Labor M.P. called for an end to “the tradition of first-cousin marriages” among Pakistanis and other South Asians in Britain. The basis for her suggestion was the claim that Pakistanis in Britain were more likely than the general population to suffer from recessive autosomal genetic disorders. Of course, so are Ashkenazi Jews, but you can hardly imagine an M.P. proposing to limit Jews’ marriage choices for this reason, especially given the historic Nazi allegation of Jewish genetic inferiority.

What is so striking about these forms of prejudice, which go beyond ordinary anti-immigrant feeling, is that they are taking root in otherwise enlightened, progressive states — states where the memory of the Holocaust has often led to the adoption of laws against anti-Semitism and racism. The reasons, therefore, must surely go beyond economic or cultural insecurity.

One factor that cannot be ignored is the threat of terrorism, so closely associated today with radical Islam. In London, Madrid and Amsterdam, terrorist acts have been perpetrated by Muslim immigrants or (more worrisome still) their children. Yet it must be remembered that Europe has also suffered homegrown terrorist attacks, motivated by everything from national liberation (in the cases of the Irish Republican Army or the Basque E.T.A.) to radical leftism (Baader-Meinhof and the Brigate Rosse). Europeans are, therefore, to a degree acclimated to terror, undercutting its power as an explanation. And in the U.S., which on Sept. 11 suffered much greater terrorist damage than any European country ever has, anti-Muslim bias does not have the political weight that it does in Europe.

Well-meaning Europeans sometimes argue that unlike the U.S., their countries are traditionally “homogeneous” and have little experience with immigration. Generalized anti-immigrant feeling, they suggest, has come to rest on Muslims simply because they are increasingly visible. In France, the specter of the “Polish plumber” undercutting French workmen’s wages played a role in recent votes, suggesting the possibility of an equal-opportunity bias. But hostility to Eastern European migrants, though real enough, still does not run as deep as corresponding hostility to Muslims.

The perception of cultural difference may help explain this disparity. Muslim immigrants are depicted in European political rhetoric as not merely backward but also illiberal, contradicting Europe’s now-prevalent commitment to tolerance of homosexuality and sex out of wedlock. At the same time, Muslims are thought to be forcing their children to maintain practices like the head scarf, which is banned in many French schools.

Continue reading "The new pariahs?"

Noah Feldman, a contributing writer for the magazine, is a law professor at Harvard University and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.