The Chimera of “Integration”

Back in the old days, immigrants to the United States were expected to assimilate into American society and culture. This meant that after a generation or so they would be indistinguishable from other Americans, except for whatever physical characteristics came with their genetic heritage. They might retain some of the customs of the “old country” within their families, but to all outward appearances they became Americans. They spoke American English as their first language, at home and elsewhere.

In my case, I knew that my maternal grandfather’s mother was a Scot, but we had no other residue of Scottishness in our family. And my great-great grandfather was from a German family, but the only sign that remained was the peculiar family habit of saying Gesundheit! to each other when we sneezed.

That’s assimilation. I’m a fully assimilated European-American.

Assimilation has fallen out of favor nowadays, and expecting it of immigrants to America is widely considered “racist”. In Europe it is not even an option — the most that one can hope for is that immigrants will “integrate”.

But what is “integration”?

The word has an amorphous meaning when used by the trans-national bureaucrats of the European Union, who seem to prefer that it remain without precise definition.

As far as I can ascertain, an immigrant to Europe is integrated if he:

1.		Learns the local language well enough to converse at work or in places of business, and to fill out social welfare forms.
2.		Refrains from committing as much crime, particularly violent crime, as he might otherwise be inclined to commit. No one expects him to meet traditional European standards of law-abiding behavior, but he should at least keep the larceny and mayhem down to a manageable level.
3.		Beats his wife or daughters only behind closed doors, and without leaving any publicly visible bruises.

And that’s about it. When European politicians lament the “failure to integrate”, they mean that culture-enrichers are not even meeting the above minimal standards.

Integration most definitely does not include:

1.		The requirement to give up any outward or inward evidence of one’s native culture. Traditional garb, fetishes, diet, scarification, ritual behaviors — all must be accepted by the host culture.
2.		Any change of habit on the part of the newcomer in deference to his new culture. His hosts must accommodate themselves to him.
3.		The expectation that he work for a living.
4.		A legal limit of only one wife per immigrant gentleman.
5.		Forbearance on the part of the immigrant from insulting, denigrating, complaining about, and otherwise displaying a negative attitude towards the culture and values of the host country.
6.		Any expectation that a newcomer’s descendants will eventually adopt even the most superficial of the customs of the society in which they live.

This is what “integration” means. It is the essence of Modern Multicultural Europe.

I bring all this up as an introduction to an email sent to us by a disgruntled Swedish reader. He has up until now been a supporter of the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna), the only Swedish political party that questions the wisdom of mass immigration from the Third World into Sweden.

Now it seems that even the Sweden Democrats have gone squishy on the issue of immigration. Could this change be part of the fallout from the Breivik massacre last year? Has the last vestige of courageous opposition been cowed into submission?

In any case, here’s what our dissident Swedish correspondent has to say:

Does he say one thing and mean another?

There is most probably no hope for Sweden!

On Tuesday, the Sweden Democrats’ party leader Jimmie Åkesson visited the Småland locality Forserum that the media recently and without substantial evidence accused of widely being a racist apartheid community.

But Jimmie Åkesson’s solution was of course not to throw out the Somalis who have behaved offensively and in a hostile manner to the ethnic Swedes in Forserum — or at least to require improvement of them.

Jimmie Åkesson wants to integrate them.

He claims that the Somalis face difficulties in Sweden [climatic?], “and that the solution is a better integration policy”.

How do you integrate Somalis — an underdeveloped and totally alien, illiterate, Mohammedan black ethnic group, with individuals not seldom with IQs as low as 80, and with qat-chewing individuals on the verge of mental retardation.

Thus Åkesson is explicitly saying that he wants to destroy Sweden forever and in the long run eliminate the ethnic Swedish population.

There is now no money left for other activities — everything is invested in Somali and MENA pseudo-integration — not even to solve the riddle of curing cancer.

From The Telegraph: “A virus that kills cancer: The cure that’s waiting in the cold because of lack of research funding.”

Such is Modern Multicultural Sweden.