The West Must Re-evaluate Everything about Immigration
Editor’s note: This essay was delivered as a panel talk at NatCon 2025.
Europe is in the middle of a civilizational emergency. The continent has lost control of its borders and its streets. Migrant violence against native Europeans is a regular occurrence. Britain has its Pakistani rape gang scandal. France has its “lost territories of the Republic.” A sense of insecurity pervades life. Deeper still is the widespread sense of cultural conflict and dispossession: a culture war in the truest, most existential sense.
A few months ago, British Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer felt he needed to show that he took these issues seriously. To demonstrate that, he paraphrased Enoch Powell’s infamous 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, the first clarion call for Great Britain to stop immigration, the speech that turned Powell into a pariah amongst all right-thinking people. Imagine a scenario where Elizabeth Warren would believe it politically attuned to paraphrase Pat Buchanan; that should give you a sense of the extent of the crisis.
The Islamist problem in Britain and Europe, made possible by mass immigration, represents the capstone of the crisis. These countries have let a conquering army in. Today, Islamists in Europe practice cultural and ethnic separatism as a stepping stone to subordinating all aspects of government and civil society to Islam, to entrenching and expanding their civilizational alternative within their host nation.
While not all Muslims are Islamists, all Islamists are Muslims. Muslim societies and organizations are uniquely vulnerable to Islamist capture. Western Europe made that capture easier by allowing so many Muslims to settle within. The continent thereby shows how the Islamist playbook works. Thanks to Europe’s trashed civilizational immune system, its blinkered postwar guilt, and its confidence that material prosperity would turn Muslim immigrants into secular citizens, its elites allowed Islamists to make inroads in European nations. Now, having belatedly realized the problem, governments fall back on exhausted principles to try and defend their battered, outraged homelands. “British values.” Laïcité. Human rights and equality. None are new slogans; none are effective.
We reassure ourselves that the civilizational struggle currently raging in Britain and Western Europe cannot happen here in the United States. We tell ourselves that America has a more self-confident, muscular liberal political culture. Besides, we say, our demographic situation isn’t as dire. The American Muslim population is a smaller percentage of the population, meaning Islamists have less fertile soil to till. In numerical terms, we are about where Britain was a decade ago, though the American Muslim population has been growing at a faster rate than it did in Britain.
The Muslim population is in 2024 1.2% of the population of the U.S. That sounds small. But in numerical terms, that’s already 3.1 million, the number that the British were at about a decade ago. At the present rate of growth—which was faster than British growth over the same period—it will jump to 10 million by the next decade. Muslims will be a plurality in majority in many neighborhoods and cities, politically transformative on college campuses, electorally decisive in Michigan, and a few other states. But still a minority.
But the problem isn’t just about demographics. Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech did discuss demographics, accurately predicting the British trajectory by the end of the twentieth century. But more importantly, Powell exposed a mindset embedded in Britain’s leadership class; a tendency to throw out one’s constitutional and cultural order to attempt to integrate completely disparate cultures en masse. The same applies to the United States. When it comes to combating Islamism, the problem is our mindset. American civilizational antibodies are much weaker than we’d like to think.
Our first weakness is our embrace of asymmetrical multiculturalism. A large majority of the American public believes that more racial and religious diversity is inherently a good thing. In treating diversity as an intrinsically desirable end, we have created a system in which “pluralism” means that the majority culture adapts to and makes accommodations for minority cultures, which are in turn not expected to change in any meaningful way. Both in our society and in the law, tolerating and respecting the rights of minority groups now means catering to them, subsidizing them, and making allowances for “cultural difference” that we do not extend to the majority.
This was another theme of Powell’s speech. To make the new multiethnic order work, Powell predicted that the British would have to start carving out exemptions and rules favoring non-native minority groups, just as the Americans started doing in the 1960s. And everywhere else shortly after that: Powell, ever attentive since the Second World War to the more insidious practices of the Global American Empire, predicted that in the late 20th century, multiculturalism and civil rights-style exemptions would become the Empire’s most successful export.
Muslim migration became one more group to fit in. Although they brought a wholly different way of life, religion, and the spectre of Islamism with them, Western leaders reassured themselves throughout the 1980s and 1990s. As living standards improved and information technology spread, globalization would defeat religious irrationality. As long as we kept saying nice things about Islam, free trade and prosperity would drive fundamentalism away.
9/11 provided an opportunity for Washington to reinforce that script, not challenge it. Less than one week after the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush declared that “Islam is peace.” On September 19th, his Administration began lobbying for “fast-tracked” negotiating authority to facilitate free trade agreements in the Middle East. If Bush did set a different course, it came a day later with that immortal line, “Our war on terror begins.” Therein lies our second weakness.
Americans treat Islamism as primarily a terrorist problem, a problem of mass violence. There’s a ready script. A terrorist attack takes place somewhere. Islamists are responsible. Our politicians distinguish between Islam and Islamism, then talk tough and drop Churchill quotes. They tighten anti-terrorist measures at home and strike more terrorist organizations abroad. Implicit in this framing is the belief that Islamism poses no meaningful threat to our civilization when its adherents are not carrying out terror attacks. We congratulate ourselves for moving beyond such divisive and dangerous domestic rhetoric; instead, we cleave to the broad, sunlit uplands of Churchillian exhortations for global intervention. “The people of the United States cannot escape world responsibility.” (Churchill in 1943; Bush in 2018).
If they’re not being violent, one can cling to the pious progressive hope that they are destined to imitate the West. In one of his speeches about Churchill, Bush said, “The tradition of liberty has advocates in every culture and in every religion.” That’s just not the case. What Bush and Blair never understood is that Islamism is first and foremost a strategy of cultural replacement. Whether one flies planes into buildings or not is a tactical question.
In 2010, Britain got a new government. David Cameron seemed to signal that Blair’s era of British multiculturalism was over. Cameron declared: “We need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism.”
This, in a phrase, captures our third vulnerability. In the United States, we have a whole intellectual mainstream dedicated to this “muscular liberalism.” Cameron’s operating principle was neutrality, which really meant anti-discrimination. But what do you do when one minority culture stands out as disproportionately responsible for certain infractions? Any measure that has a disproportionate effect on a minority group could violate anti-discrimination provisions—the neutrality proviso of our “muscular liberalism.” So all ideologies need to be treated the same. For British Tories, the fight is not against Islamism specifically but against “extremism” and dangers to “liberal democracy.” This kind of thinking is catnip for many Americans, who imagine themselves occupying the vital center against extremists of the left and right.
How does muscular liberalism work in practice? When multiculturalism and anti-discrimination clash with the venerable framework of liberal rights, we water down the content of the latter in order to preserve the former. France has too many migrant delinquents roaming the streets. As a result, many cities in France now impose curfews on all minors. Britain has too many young men knifing people. As a result, the government has passed and now enforces general laws against possessing knives. We do the same over here. Too many immigrants living in the U.S. are using their bank accounts to send money to nefarious actors abroad—or indeed, to receive it. So banks need to monitor the activities of all their clients, subjecting us all to the threat of “de-banking.” That’s muscular liberalism at work. Muscular liberalism is really the language used to veil over a new mode of postliberal administrative governance, which stretches from the ever-more powerful tools of the national security state to the strategies of surveillance capitalism. It’s the way to make multiculturalism work.
Moreover, the protected classes skillfully exploit the amorphousness of the neutrality proviso and wield anti-discrimination law to their advantage. Islamists and their allies claim “Islamophobia” to paralyze their opponents, using the law to carve out a larger and larger slice of the public square for themselves. As Powell predicted in 1968, they know how “to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided.”
We need to chart a different course. First, we don’t need more debates about the meaning of liberalism; we need actual symmetrical constitutionalism, rooted in our historical practice, the fundamental law, and the unwritten constitution required to sustain it. In this country, that means that the right to worship, for Muslims and Christians, remains.
Yet that doesn’t mean we need to approve building permits and licensing for projects that promote the provocations of cultural separatism, such as the infamous Ground Zero mosque. We should have not confuse the first amendment with a right to build something wherever one wants however one wants. During the height of that debate, pollsters posed this thesis: “there are some places in the United States where it is not appropriate to build mosques, though it would be appropriate to build other houses of worship.” That thesis is sound. In theory, the path is clear. Calvin Coolidge provided the mindset we need. “Those who do not want to be partakers of the American spirit ought not to settle in America.” Minorities should have additional, asymmetrical expectations placed on them to integrate and assimilate into the cultural majority.
That’s a fairly traditional American demand, and it’s not hard to find learned liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger making it. Coupled with conservatives such as Russell Kirk articulating the content of American culture, these statements could dictate what expectations we should place on new arrivals to make them less likely to be captured by foreign ideologies such as Islamism.
But in practice, we can’t just expect to announce the ideal standards of assimilation, defeat critics, and apply the standards. We’re living through a crisis of solidarity, brought about by the collapse of educational standards, community, culture, and religion. Yes, we’re doing better than Europe in some ways; unlike in Europe, a majority of Americans still identify as Christian, and those numbers are holding steady. The Christian core of Western Civilization, without which paeans to “the West” are just empty chatter, remains.
But when the victories of the culture war are saving the Cracker Barrel logo, we should recognize that even among conservative Christians who love this country, our sense of self, as a nation, is precariously thin. The ethos of the American civic religion has become extremely shallow. Even if we can win the assimilation debate and apply better standards, our legal, educational, and ecclesial institutions just are not up for the task we’d like them to bear. Most institutions and churches aren’t healthy enough to transmit something robust to the next American generation. Why are we assuming that they’re healthy enough to handle the task of integrating disparate cultures into the American spirit? They need more time to heal themselves. But we’re running out of time. The demographic problem is starting to catch up.
The last public celebration of Russell Kirk, just before his death, took place in October 1993, in Dearborn, Michigan. It was a fitting tribute, but it was also an ironic one. Dearborn is America’s first Arab-majority city, the “motherland away from the motherland,” as one resident proudly told the BBC last year.
Many immigrants to America have been fed this idea: that America is merely a special economic zone, where you can live just as you did before, and retain and transmit the spirit of a foreign culture and people. You can have your “motherland away from the motherland” here, just with more money. They have been fed that idea by politicians and elites who believe it themselves—who lack both love and sense of country, and whose thumotic poverty has pervaded our public life for decades.
Immigration reform is no longer a matter of reducing numbers. We need to recognize the extent of our elite and institutional failure. We need to admit that our institutions aren’t up for the task of integrating millions. What we once did as a country is no longer possible.
Moreover, we need to tell many of those who’ve immigrated here in the last two decades that we cannot offer them the life that they expect us to provide for them without damaging our own national fabric further—an unacceptable and unjust tradeoff. This means that immigration reform now requires offering them a viable alternative. It requires voluntary inducements to depart forever from the United States. In facing the crisis of solidarity, remigration has become the essential political question. We have entered a period in which Winston Churchill matters less to us than Enoch Powell. Powell helped us see the shape of our problem. It’s up to us to muster the courage to follow through.
