Carina

Wrong question. "Will Islam take over America by 2050?" Grok pulls up the Pew numbers, everyone nods, debate closed. But nobody serious is worried about a sharia takeover. The real question is simpler and far more uncomfortable: does it actually work to put two cultures with very different ways of life in the same place, at scale, and hope it sorts itself out? Good timing, I'm French. We've been running that experiment for 40 years. Here's how it went. Starting in the 80s, the French left turned immigration from a practical question into a moral one. SOS Racisme, "Touche pas à mon pote", concerts, badges. The message was clear: if you ask whether integration is actually working, you're a racist. End of conversation. The right was too scared to push back, so it went along. Meanwhile entire neighborhoods were built, filled, and left to themselves. In 2011 a think tank close to the Socialist Party openly advised the left to stop chasing the working class and build its majority on minorities and graduates instead. Immigration stopped being a policy. It became an electoral strategy. Where we are now: the 2005 riots. 2015, Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan. Samuel Paty, a history teacher beheaded in 2020 for showing a cartoon in a class on free speech. Dominique Bernard, a teacher stabbed to death in his own school in 2023. Teachers who self-censor. Neighborhoods where police go in with caution. Whole parts of the country where the Republic exists mostly on paper. And this isn't a far-right talking point. Gérard Collomb, longtime Socialist mayor of Lyon and Macron's Interior Minister, a man who read the police notes every single morning, said this the day he left office in 2018: "Today we live side by side. I fear that tomorrow we will live face to face." That's the real subject. Not a takeover. A slow erosion. Trust between neighbors. Schools that can teach everything. Police that can enter every street. People willing to pay taxes for strangers because they feel those strangers are part of the same "us". That's what makes a country work, and it's exactly what dissolves, one neighborhood at a time, when you stack communities next to each other with no shared norms and forbid anyone from saying so. Second case: the UK. Rotherham. At least 1,400 children sexually exploited between 1997 and 2013 according to the official Jay report, overwhelmingly by gangs of men of Pakistani heritage. Then Rochdale, Oldham, Telford, Bradford. And the worst part isn't even the crimes. It's that police, social workers and councils knew, and looked away, partly because they were terrified of being called racist. Girls of 12 and 13 were treated as if they were making "lifestyle choices". It took until 2025 for a national audit to say it plainly, and until 2026 for a full national inquiry to open. Decades late. Hundreds of recommendations ignored. Same mechanism as France. A taboo that protects an ideology, and real people who pay the price. So here's my question to everyone still defending this model: why? Why absolutely insist on forcing this project when every time it's been run at scale, it produced chaos? Chaos for the natives who watch their country change under their feet and get called bigots for noticing. And chaos for immigrants and their kids, stuck in ghettos, pulled between two worlds, the majority who just want a normal life lumped in with the worst. Nobody wins. Except the people who get to feel morally superior from neighborhoods where none of this ever happens. America still has time to have this conversation honestly. Europe waited 40 years. Don't.