Thinning patience

January 12 , 2015

Fifth Column - Gwynne Dyer

The language of the immigration debate in Germany has got extreme. German Chancellor Angela Merkel attacked the anti-immigration movement in her New Year speech, saying its leaders have "prejudice, coldness, even hatred in their hearts."

The "anti-Islamisation" protests all across Germany fizzled out in the end. About 18,000 people showed up at one rally in Dresden, where the weekly protests by the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West (Pegida) began last October, but that hardly counted because there are few Muslims in Dresden. Anti-immigrant sentiment in Western countries is always highest where there are few or no immigrants. In big German cities that do have large immigrant populations, the counter-demonstrators outnumbered the Pegida protesters ten-to-one. But the debate is not over.

Germany is taking in more immigrants than ever before: more than 6,00,000 this year. That's not an intolerable number for a country of 82 million, but it does mean that if current trends persist, the number of foreign-born residents will almost double in just ten years. That will take some getting used to - and there's another thing. A high proportion of the new arrivals in Germany are Muslim refugees. Two-thirds of those 6,00,000 newcomers in 2014 were from other countries of the European Union. They have the legal right to come under EU rules, and there's really nothing Germany can do about it. Besides, few of the EU immigrants are Muslims.

Hard road

The other 2,00,000, however, are almost all refugees who are seeking asylum in Germany. The number has almost doubled in the past year, and will certainly grow even larger this year. And the great majority of the asylum-seekers are Muslims. This is not a Muslim plot to colonize Europe. It's just that a large majority of the refugees in the world are Muslims. At least three-quarters of the world's larger wars are civil wars in Muslim countries like Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and Libya. It is easy to mock the fears of the "Pegida" - only five per cent of Germany's population is Muslim. But nine per cent of the children born in Germany in recent years have Muslim parents because of the higher birth rates of Middle Eastern immigrants.

If the current wave of asylum-seekers continues, then Germany will add another two million Muslim immigrants to its population in the next decade. And they too will have higher birth rates than the locals. With its current asylum policy, Germany could be 10 per cent Muslim ten years from now. You might reasonably ask: what's wrong with having a 10 per cent Muslim population? But it's hard to think of a Muslim country that would welcome the relatively sudden arrival of a 10 percent Christian minority with equanimity.

And special thanks to the Islamist thugs who committed the massacre at Charlie Hebdo in Paris for making it even harder for Europeans to see the difference between terrorist fanatics and ordinary Muslims. Most Europeans still try to see things in proportion and not judge all Muslims by the acts of a few, but they are failing more frequently. People are people, and their tolerance has limits.

Even in Sweden, the most heroically open country in Europe, where they are expecting more than 1,00,000 asylum applications, former prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said: "I'm now pleading with the Swedish people to have patience, to open your hearts, to see people in high distress whose lives are being threatened. Show them that openness, show them tolerance."

Once more, the Swedes did that. The mainstream parties have formed a coalition government that is pledged not to slam the gates shut on asylum-seekers. But the anti-immigration party, the Sweden Democrats, more than doubled its vote and became the third-largest party. Even in Sweden, time is running out on tolerance.