That people in developed countries find immigration distasteful is hardly a matter of question. Most Europeans answer that immigration is an “important” or “extremely important threat”[1]. This attitude can be attributed to many factors: xenophobia, certainly, but also worries about unemployment, terrorism and the apparent failure of multiculturalism.
The last reason is particularly relevant to the Netherlands, where the debate on immigration has become much more public since the murder of Theo van Gogh, a controversial filmmaker and a critic of multiculturalism. In 2004, he directed the short film Submission, which heavily condemned Islam’s treatment of women. He reportedly dismissed friends’ concern for his safety after the film’s release with the words, “Who would want to kill the town idiot?”
Theo van Gogh
Well, Mohammed Bouyeri, a 26-year-old, well-educated and, to all appearances, well-integrated Dutch citizen, did and succeeded. He was quickly apprehended by the Dutch police, but this incident reverberated with surprising intensity. Van Gogh had always generated controversy – while he saw political Islam as a threat to Western liberalization, he was an equal opportunity critic and provoked politicians, actors, writers and Jews alike with his vitriol and obscenities. His death, though, turned him into a martyr and fueled the heretofore hidden worry whether the assimilation of immigrants is truly possible.
This concern is echoed in the more academic voice of Samuel Huntington, whose position on immigration is essentially that the larger the immigrant community, the less likely the immigrants are to truly become integrated into their destination society. Indeed, popular psychology literature argues that second generation immigrants, even as they assert autonomy in adolescence, are quite content to remain embedded within their immigrant community[2]. And, as the case of Mohammed Bouyeri proves, Western education does not entirely sever this sense of connection to the parent culture.
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