The title of Doug Saunders’s book, The Myth of the Muslim Tide: Do Immigrants Threaten the West?, captures the two arguments at its core. First, claims that Muslim immigrants constitute an overpowering tide that threatens to wash away liberal-democratic standards and otherwise imperil western civilization are demonstrably false and therefore constitute a “myth.” Second, previous “waves” of immigrants whose religions diverged from those of receiving societies were, over the course of time, successfully integrated and today no longer provoke such fears. Hindsight demonstrates that the threat to the West posed by Catholics and Jews was wrong. Saunders maintains that in time we will see that the same will be true of today’s Muslim immigrants: “once newcomers become part of our economy and politics, the cultural part takes care of itself.”
Saunders’s first argument is ably defended. The second neglects important differences in the integration experiences of Jewish...
Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the School of Public Policy and Governance. He is the author of Becoming Multicultural: Immigration and the Politics of Membership in Canada and Germany (University of British Columbia Press, 2012).
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