Trump is tapping into a deep-rooted fear. It is the same fear that sustains the popularity of many extreme right-wing parties throughout Europe, from France’s National Front to Greece’s Golden Dawn. It is thus legitimate to ask whether the recent wave of immigration into Europe and the United States from Muslim-majority countries is compromising the safety of host populations. But the evidence suggests that the fears are misguided: Liberal democracies are not opening their doors to terrorism when they let in Muslim immigrants. [...]
By studying a population of Senegalese Christian and Muslim immigrants from the Serer and Joola religiously mixed communities who migrated to France under identical conditions, we found that Muslim immigrants face greater discrimination in the labor market, earn less monthly income, express less attachment to their host country, and exhibit greater attachment to their country of origin than do their Christian counterparts. And these patterns do not improve in subsequent generations. The cause of this failure of integration is twofold: Islamophobia on the part of French society and Muslim immigrants’ tendency to identify more with their home communities in response. As a result, Europe is creating a class of under-employed immigrants who feel little or no connection with their host societies.
But linking Muslim immigration to terrorism is a mistake. Liberal societies should not condemn people simply for having the same cultural background as murderous criminals. (It would be as ludicrous as blaming all Italian-Americans for mafia killings.) Moreover, the obsession with Muslim immigration focuses on the wrong targets. Terrorists tend not to be poor, uneducated, or even, in many cases, of Muslim heritage. Olivier Roy, an expert on Islam, has used data from France’s “S File”—the French government’s antiterrorism watch list—to create an evidence-based portrait of today’s French jihadists. French jihadists are for the most part either second-generation French citizens—the children of relatively non-religious immigrants, who were born and raised in France—or native French converts—French citizens with no immigrant background who have converted to Islam. What unifies these two groups is not Islam; it is a sense of generational revolt. Similarly, among Western recruits who join the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), a disproportionate number are converts to Islam. This is why Roy describes the threat not as the radicalization of Islam but as the Islamization of radicalism.
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