Americans like to be first in everything, even when it comes to immigrant strife. And so, in anticipation of what they think will be another historic battle of the US culture wars, the old left has donned its armor and sharpened its rhetoric, this time in the name of undocumented workers and their human rights (do bank robbers make undocumented withdrawals?). And with courage and vigor the Cardinal Archbishop of Los Angeles has told his flock to gird for civil disobedience to thwart an immigration law that does not exist and that would not do what he says — make criminals out of priests and nuns — if it did exist. In reality, the immigrant problem in America is a minor one, especially when it is compared to the European dilemma. To juxtapose: In the United States, immigrants (both legal and illegal) supplement native births that hover at replacement rate. The combination of these native births and immigration has resulted in continued population growth. Europe's problem is far more serious, and it is based upon the cataclysmic reality that native Europeans have largely stopped having children. More native Germans were born in 1946 — with all of those missing men, in the hundreds of thousands, killed or wounded or marching into captivity, every city bombed to rubble, and real starvation hanging in the air — than in 2006. Thus, immigrants have been brought to the continent of Europe not to supplement native births, but in a very real sense to replace the native births that no longer take place, or no longer take place in sufficient numbers.
And these immigrants, largely North African, largely Muslim, decidedly do not share the principles and propositions of their adopted homeland, the Enlightenment principles of rationality and tolerance, nor do they respect the institutions — including the pan-European secular, bureaucratic, social welfare state — that reflect those principles.
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