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What difference does it make? They're building a parallel society. If you give them a street and they commit less crime it's still not yours to live on. If you give them a city and they make it rich it's still not your money to spend. If you give them your country it's not yours anymore, it's theirs.
Unless they were integrating. Are the Sikhs integrating? Apparently they have their own rituals we have to grant them religious exemptions for. And they don't behave like White Britons -- by your own argument they don't commit crime at the same rate. Presumably they are different.
(Not that I would assume they commit crime at lower rates anyways. Basically every immigrant group commits more crime than native Brits with the exception of other European groups and the Japanese. It's possible the Sikh are genuinely exceptional and I know they are different from standard Indians / Muslims / Arabs / etc. But if a random Sikh murders a kid and his family helps him cover up the crime I'm going to assume that they're actually not exceptional: I've never heard of a Japanese immigrant family doing that.)
I mean, it is if you tax them and redistribute the money.
Although it doesn't actively proselytize as much as Christianity, Sikhism is not an ethnic religion; any person of any ethnicity can convert to it if they become convinced that its teachings hold the true answers about the Divine. Accordingly this is, as it says in the name, a religious, not ethnic, exemption. In other words, to not have it would infringe upon the religious freedom of Britons of any race by foreclosing the possibility for a white Englishman of converting to Sikhism if he wants to.
Now as an atheist, I'm not that big a fan of religious exemptions. But ultimately, they're a Chesterton's Fence whose origins are not very hard to dig up. Bad things happen if the government starts steamrolling over the faithful's objections with "there's not actually an angry sky man who will send you to Hell if you work on a Sunday/do indulgences/mix meat and dairies, get over it". Granted Sikhs are enough of a religious minority that pissing them off on their own wouldn't start a religious war, but it seems straightforwardly more principled for the state to say "we withhold judgment about the truth-value of any recognized religion" than "we withhold judgment about the truth-value of Christianity and Islam, but because there's so few of them we're going to functionally write it into law that you cannot simultaneously act in accordance with a belief in the divinely-inspired truth of the Guru Granth Sahib, and be a law-abiding citizen in our country".
We can do the same thing with tariffs. And then we don't have neighborhoods full of foreigners who will hide the Bataclan bombers after they make their getaway.
I don't agree with it, but the English have adopted weapons bans as a virtue. They also have religious freedom as a virtue. In accommodating immigrant Sikh values, they now have to accommodate exceptions in their weapons bans. These are two contradictory virtues. They can't actually coexist meaningfully. This is a conflict caused by immigration. Your proposed solution, essentially, is to jettison arms control in favor of religious freedom, i.e., that English society should change even more in order to accommodate the Sikh. It can be perfectly English to be Sikh! Well, it wasn't 50 years ago, and it wasn't even common until extremely recently. If the challenges of integrating migrants are to be solved by England changing to accommodate them, what's the argument in favor of accepting migrants? Trade deal: You change your society and culture and values, and we give you welfare consumers, a housing shortage, and endless supply of accusations of racism, and occasional stabbings. We will integrate on our terms, not yours, and maybe, just maybe, statistically, we'll perform better on some made-up statistical measures. Oh and you don't have a choice and this downgrade is permanent.
The UK already had hard-won religious freedom; it just didn't have meaningful representation of a religion whose commandments conflicted with a weapons ban, so the issue hadn't come up. It might very well have come up even with zero immigration, if a lot of white Englishmen had started converting to Sikhism out of some trend, in the same way that so many British hippies got into Buddhism.
And I guess I just don't see that big of a conflict there… I think "virtue" is a weird way to describe the weapons ban. I don't believe Brits think it's deontologically wrong or taboo to carry knives; I think they've adopted weapons bans as a technocratic, utilitarian policy. Whether religious freedom is to be thought of as a deontological line-in-the-sand or consequentialist utilmaxxing is perhaps more debatable, but in either case, this makes it sensible to trade one against the other depending on circumstances. Something like: "I believe that in a vacuum, it is good to minimize the amount of citizens permitted to carry knives, as doing so will reduce violent crime and I do not believe that people have an innate right to bear arms. However, I also believe that the state should rarely if ever ban religious practices. Therefore, the best way to maximize utility while respecting the constraints of respecting religious freedom is a weapons for ban for everyone except people whose religion mandates that they carry a ritual knife on their person at all times" is in no way incoherent or self-contradictory.
(Again, it seems isomorphic to other kinds of religious exemptions, i.e. "I do not believe that parents should have the right to pull their kids out of school whenever they like; but I believe it's important for the state to respect religious practices; therefore parents are allowed to let their kids skip school on their faith's recognized holy days, but not for any other reason". I don't think there's a "virtue" of respecting religious freedom, and a "virtue" of mandatory education, that are in conflict here in any problematic way, it's a very common-sensical status quo to end up with.)
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Are Jews integrated in the United States? Are the Irish? Are Texans? What are the standards for 'building a parallel society' such that we should apply it to British Sikhs?
If an Irish man used a religious exemption to acquire a weapon to murder somebody and his Irish friends and family closed ranks to help him hide the weapon and spin up bogus anti-Irish racism charges, I would not consider that proof of integration.
You put "building a parallel society" in quotes and I'm not sure if I should read that as scare quotes. But to be clear, there are absolutely Muslim, ethnic, and immigrant neighborhoods in major cities in Britain and across Europe that function as parallel societies. There are parts of London where it is not safe to be gay. There are parts of Marseilles where it is not safe to be white. Would it make a difference to you if those areas had lower reported crime stats? It doesn't to me.
That's not what happened here. Sikhs have a religious exemption that allows them to carry a knife as a religious article. If the murderer had converted to Sikhism in order to acquire a knife with which to murder someone, this argument might have legs, but it didn't.
However, the Irish were and are religiously deviant from the US' predominantly Protestant culture, have a long history of "overperforming" the nation as a whole in crime, and to this day many of them live in ethnic enclaves with distinctive social norms. Really, I'm just trying to get some clarity as to what constitutes non-integration by your standards, since you allude to some yardsticks, but don't state them clearly.
I'm quoting you. You are claiming that Sikhs are building a parallel society in Britain. On what basis do you claim this? So far, the primary justification you've offered is that they get a religious exemption that allows them to carry a kirpan.
Ok I see how you read what I wrote to connote something different than what you just wrote, but I mean that he "used a religious exemption to acquire a weapon" which was used "to murder somebody". Which I think is the same thing.
British society was changed in a small way to accommodate an immigrant. (A normal British man would not have needed a Sikh religious weapons exemption, even if a normal British man could have theoretically converted to Sikhism.) What did British society get for this? In this case, a murderer and his family. Maybe there is some other greater benefit that renders this a price worth paying? I'm not seeing it.
Yeah, and I'm not sure whether to read your quotation back to me of my own words as using scare quotes or not. I do not think it is controversial to say, however, that many immigrants to Britain are building a parallel society. This is why I am repeating my claim. I think it is evidenced, at a minimum, by the fact that a Sikh immigrant murdered someone and his Sikh family sheltered him and advised him on how to get out of it. They don't act like integrated citizens putting Britain's interests above their prior clannish loyalties. We could start looking at other examples if you like. But to me it's a claim so obviously in evidence that when you quote my words back to me in that form, and I can't read your tone of voice, it becomes unclear to me what is actually under dispute. If you are disputing the point that I find totally uncontroversial, then we have a really different disagreement than if you just want me to elaborate on a related or unrelated point.
Right, mass migration changed America permanent ways, many of them negative. Some American cities are still governed by the descendants of the political machines the Irish (and other immigrant groups) begot. Nobody today would claim (I would not claim) that the Irish aren't American. It basically worked out. But it was not an easy or painless process! In some sense we're still paying the cost today.
So if you want to tease out what it means to be integrated, that's one thing, but if you want to dispute the costs and benefits of mass migration, that's another. I think the case of the Irish proves my point in fact. Unless you're just trying to tease out what it means to be integrated. Which is why it matters whether I read your quotation of my own words back to me as a case of square quotes or not.
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