[aibrahem]

As an immigrant from a Muslim majority country into a European country, I find this approach very troubling.

I completely agree that most of the immigrants have a lot of trouble integrating into the host countries but I believe it’s as much as a problem of the hosting culture as it is the of the immigrants coming in.

It’s not just the Muslims, though they might be the most pronounced case (just because the sheer number of immigrants), immigrants from India, China, and even Eastern Europe face similar issues.

Anytime there is going to be a mass immigration to a specific place there is going to be a concentration of immigrant communities in certain places, it happened with the Irish and Italians in the US, and still happening with a lot of different areas in America (Michigan is one of the heaviest populated areas by Christian Arabs). The reason being is that when you first immigrate to a new place it’s a lot easier to stick to the people you know and share behaviors with than to go out and make a new social circle.

However, the culture of the host society plays a big role in the acceptance of foreigners, for example, people in the US and Canada are usually a perceived to be lot friendlier than most typical Western Europeans, it’s a lot easier to chit-chat with an American than to a Dutch, German, or French person..., It is also very easy to get to know people in the US, meanwhile unless you’ve really gotten to know each other it’s very difficult to get close to a typical European. Norwegians usually joke that if two people get on the bus one of them is going to set at the front and the other all the way in the back.

Another culture tidbit that could contribute to this is that conformity plays a very huge part in the European culture, and they just confirm to a very different set of values than the ones where these immigrants are coming from, find someone walking naked down the street, that’s completely normal but finding a women wearing burqa on a beach and suddenly a lot of heads are turning. Although this might also happen in the US but with the American stress on individualism it’s always reassuring that it’s OK to be who you are, rather than the typical European mindset of why don’t you just take it off and be like everyone else.

Also The Hollywood effect, immigrants coming to America usually have a base understanding of what to expect coming in from watching movies, TV shows or even the news and are usually touched in one way or another by the American culture, meanwhile it’s very difficult to understand the culture subtleties when you don’t understand the language and haven’t been exposed to this culture before and add that to the stress on conformity as mentioned before and very quickly you become an outcast in your social circle.

My point is that brute forcing people to integrate is simply the incorrect approach to solve this issue, culture intricacies needs to be studied and incompatibilities with the immigrant and host culture needs to be addressed to reach an effective solution, otherwise what you’ll have is a very angry socially inept minority that could sing Jingle bells.

[drukenemo]

This is the best comment I've read here so far, and interesting to learn you're also a Muslim. You're clearly very well educated too.

I do have concerns though in relation to political Islam. Watching some videos hearing from "the horses mouth", I find troublesome to expect any possible integration from the many millions of Muslims already living in the EU. As the following video shows, it's the common Muslim who thinks like what the Western only attributes to the radical Muslim.

I'd like to hear your comments about the contents of this video please https://youtu.be/fhBvzliBey4?t=1m30s