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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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Surely this is an empirical question. What has Muslim immigration been like for America? What are Muslims in America actually like? PEW did a giant study back in 2007 that surveyed over 60000 Muslims in American and found they're... pretty similar to the general American public. Less likely to go to college and a little bit more likely to be poor. They did have more socially conservative views than the general American public but, like, "median American of 1994" not, like, "median American of the 1800's". I think it's pretty easy to believe that a substantial shift in the social beliefs of Muslims can occur over the course of some decades, given we have already seen such a shift occur in the general public's perception over a similar time frame. Maybe Islam is going to turn out to be inoculating against modernity in a way that Christianity or Judaism weren't but color me skeptical.

I’m not convinced. The behavior of Muslims doesn’t indicate they’re 1990s style Americans who are okay with other religions as equals. They’re absolutely not okay with gays, they don’t want women working, and so on. There are numerous videos of Muslims preaching that America or Europe will become Muslim. A Baptist preacher saying even 10% of that is a far right radical. A Baptist preacher saying that and blocking major roads for prayer services would be probably thrown out of the SBC.

A lot depends on how much of a filter immigration is, immigrants who go through a highly selective system are obviously going to be better than refugees or illegal immigrants who don't. Due to geographical proximity Europe has more unfiltered Muslim immigrants, and correspondingly has more problems with them. That said, I suspect that even for unfiltered immigrants a lot of the difference would disappear if you controlled for race.