Lesley Davis
- When assimilation is treated as optional, you don’t get one people. You get several, living side by side, increasingly hostile to one another and to the civic order meant to bind them.
Something is breaking in Europe, and it should stop every American cold.
For a generation, governments across the continent made two bets at once. They opened their borders to historic levels of immigration, and they built ever-larger welfare states to absorb the newcomers. Leaders promised the numbers didn’t matter, that assimilation would take care of itself, and that a nation could import millions of people while asking nothing of them in return.
Now that bet is failing in plain view.
Cities once counted among the glories of the West now hold parallel communities that share a postal code but not a country. Whole populations reject the language, the laws, and the basic commitments of the nations that took them in. When assimilation is treated as optional, you don’t get one people. You get several, living side by side, increasingly hostile to one another and to the civic order meant to bind them.
The welfare state guaranteed the collapse. A country can run a generous safety net or it can run mass, unscreened immigration, but it cannot do both for long. Sweden’s spending on migration and integration climbed into the billions of kronor while its social cohesion frayed. France pours money into banlieues that remain no-go zones for its own police. This is the socialist arithmetic laid bare: promise everything to everyone, tax the productive to pay for it, and watch growth stall while dependency spreads and the budget buckles. Generosity without limits isn’t compassion. It is a nation spending down the inheritance its founders built and calling the decline a virtue.
Here’s why this lands in the United States and not just in Paris.
We’ve already imported a smaller version of the same experiment, and we call it our blue cities. Chicago runs deficits in the billions while its murder count shames the nation. San Francisco spends more per resident than almost any city in America and gets open-air drug markets and boarded storefronts for the money. Portland and Seattle excused disorder as justice until their own residents fled. And we’ve all seen the taxpayer-funded billion-dollar welfare fraud schemes in places like Minnesota.
These governments spend more and deliver less, excuse lawlessness in the name of empathy, and treat American civic culture as something to apologize for rather than pass on.
Some of the dynamics are different, but the underlying philosophy is strikingly similar: government expands, expectations shrink, and accountability disappears.
None of this is an argument against immigrants. It is an argument for assimilation, for reasonable limits, and for confidence in our own founding as a Judeo-Christian nation. A nation
has every right to decide how many people it welcomes and to expect that those who come will embrace its principles and obey its laws. That is not cruelty. It is the basic maintenance every free society owes itself.
America still has the time Europe has already spent. We can make immigration serve the country instead of straining it. We can expect assimilation instead of apologizing for asking. And we can reject the tax-and-dependency model hollowing out the nations we once looked up to.
Europe is living through the ending. We still have time to write a different one.
