ARE MUSLIM IMMIGRANTS A THREAT? an historic comparison

Many Americans worry about Muslim immigration. They fear these newcomers are culturally incompatible, religiously intolerant, and potentially larcenous. Moreover they imagine them flooding into this country in unacceptable numbers. What should we make of this? 

Let's make a comparison. In the 19th century lots of Americans were similarly concerned about the Irish Catholics who were flooding into what then was an overwhelmingly Protestant America. 

A major concern was that these immigrants were obedient to a foreign autocrat — the Pope — who led an authoritarian and anti- Protestant institution. They doubted that a people accustomed to such religious authoritarian intolerance, could ever learn to live in democratic America. In fact they feared these Catholics might band together and become another America. And their concern was magnified by the exceedingly large numbers of these immigrants. By the dawn of the Civil War the Catholic presence in America already exceeded the total population of the U.S. just 70 years previously. And their numbers swelled much, much further as the 19th century advanced. 

This was an awful lot of culturally different people for the U.S. to absorb. But ultimately, despite widespread discrimination, these Irish Catholic immigrants proved capable of blending in to the fabric of the nation, They understood, embraced, even exploited democracy, and by the third generation had provided the nation with the 35th President of the United States, the very Irish-American John F. Kennedy, .

So far how have the Muslims done in contrast? First off, there has never been an America without Muslims. But most of the early arrivals were slaves and soon lost their Muslim religion. These days most Muslims arrive direct from Muslim lands. They pledge no allegiance to the equivalent of a Pope, nor even embrace a unified religion. In fact they harbor bloody disagreements about what it takes to even be a Muslim. But the one thing they aren't is Christian. And that makes a decided difference in how they are both received and perceived.

The fear that they threaten to overwhelm us by sheer numbers is factually groundless. Right now Muslim immigrants constitute a tiny number of new arrivals compared to the historic flood of Irish Catholics. In fact they amount to less than 5% of all immigrants entering the America. Plus, Muslims now account for less than 1% of America's population.  

But what about Muslim immigrants fitting in? Will they prove absorbable or forever marginal — even alien? We shall see. But present reality is that a substantial number of Americans believe the United States is, and should remain, a Christian nation. For these folks non-Christians are, ipso facto, un-American. Moreover a substantial number of them also maintain that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. This belief is false, of course. Nevertheless, it is continually reinforced by far right Christian-nationalists including some well-known preachers. These "patriots" ignore, or are ignorant, of the fact that many of America’s most influential founders, for instance Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Ethan Allen and Thomas Paine, were deists or rationalists, not Christians. Moreover our founders agreed that the United States should NOT adopt a state religion. But none of this gives pause to those who subscribe to the Christian-America myth. 

Clearly Muslims and Christians do not always share a happy coexistence. Nor do a lot of Muslims fit cozily into the Western way of life. The most fanatical among them, a small minority to be sure, even aim to convert all of America to Islam — if necessary, by the sword. At minimum they want to install their version of Sharia Law in place of current law. Fortunately, these true believers appear to constitute a small minority. 

There is, however, another problem.  A small number of Muslims and Muslim-Americans, have turned out to be murderous terrorists. Those who crashed passenger planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon being the most prominent. Yes, these perpetrators were Saudi nationals. But many Americans still link terrorism to Muslims in general. And this is why a sizable segment of Americans oppose Muslim immigration.

Remember, too, that some Somali-Americans massively defrauded Minnesota, Maine and the United States government out of billions and billions of dollars in what was intended as aid. This massive fraud causes some Americans to link criminality and exploitive, ungrateful citizenship to Muslims collectively. But the Irish-American immigration experience proves Muslims have no corner on immigrant criminality. Some immigrant Irish became criminals of the first magnitude; and the "Irish Mob" was one of the nation’s most notorious organized criminal conspiracies. Plus, some later arriving Italian-Americans proved equally capable of organized criminality. Somali immigrant’s have no patent on this kind of behavior. But people believe they do, then that belief is true in its consequences. 

 Looking back, many Americans once initially thought Irish-American Roman Catholic immigrants were a distinct threat. This proved false. Will Muslim immigrants also attain, even desire, the same degree of acceptance? We shall see.