UK view of Europe's immigration debate: "Multiculturalism needs defenders"

[pampango]

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/adrian-hamilton/adrian-hamilton-multiculturalism-needs-defenders-2112071.html

Multiculturalism was once a term of tolerance, an acceptance of difference in an increasingly cosmopolitan and urbanised western world. Today it has become just a convenient label which politicians can use to assault immigration. Now Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has seized on it to read the funeral rites over an open society. "Multikulti," she declared at the weekend, "has utterly failed." It was wishful thinking, she argued, to believe that Germans and foreigners "could live happily side by side.... We kidded ourselves for a while that they wouldn't stay, but that's not the reality."

The attack on "multiculturalism" is just a mask for expressing prejudices that would have been regarded as unacceptable and unrepeatable a decade ago – that the "guestworkers" were basically welfare scroungers, that they didn't and wouldn't subscribe to the culture of their hosts, that they were less educated and less educable than the majority "whites," that they somehow resented and challenged social values based on culture, language and the Christian religion.

But it is significant that the language being used is the language of racism of the 1930s – that it contains and implies attitudes of ethnic purity and cultural superiority, alongside xenophobia, which are dangerous in their logic and potentially extreme in their emotion. Multiculturalism as adumbrated in Britain in the 1960s, was developed precisely to still these sorts of attitudes. It wasn't a policy of letting everyone do their own thing so much as a counteraction to the suspicion and hostility to difference that immigration was bringing. More than that it never really defined itself, which is why it can be so easily misused now.

Its assumption was that immigrants, just as the Huguenots and the Jews of the late 19th century had, would integrate through generations, that over time their children would grow up much like everyone else in their society. That assumption has been challenged, but it is true. The post-war insertion of immigrant labour in industrial towns, rather than the pre-war waves of social and political refugees fanning out from the ports of entry, has posed real problems as these industries have declined.
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Sounds like the decline in Merkel's popularity has led her to join Sarkozy and other European conservatives in blaming immigrants for the problems of German society.