Europe's anti-Islam backlash is an expression of loss of confidence

There is a realisation in Europe that power is shifting away to the East, to China and India. Muslims are the focus of this rage because they are most visible. But the brutal truth is that Europe cannot thrive without immigration: its birth rate is too low to support a thriving economy.

Anyone in the Middle East who is thinking of moving to live in Europe must surely be having second thoughts now. Immigration in Europe has been a hot political topic for years, but the debate moved to a new level when the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, whose political style is the opposite of rabble-rousing, declared that her country's experiment with multiculturalism was an "utter failure".
The assessment was hardly original. But her words were greeted with a standing ovation from her Christian Democratic Union party. Europe's centre-right parties now feel sufficiently threatened by the rise of far-right, anti-immigrant voices that they have joined them in calling for a radical rethink of immigration.
The German political landscape has been upset by a hitherto obscure central banker, Thilo Sarrazin, whose book, Germany Does Away With Itself, promotes the thesis that Muslim immigration is making the country stupid. His pseudo-scientific rant is still No 1 on the German Amazon political best-seller list, two months after publication.
An opinion poll by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a left-leaning think-tank, has attracted worldwide attention with its findings that 36 per cent of Germans think the country is overrun by foreigners. Only slightly fewer think that foreigners come not to work, but to get social benefits. In traditionally conservative Bavaria, the state premier, Horst Seehofer, is calling for an end to immigration from Turkey and Arab countries.
The anti-immigrant backlash is now Europe-wide. In The Netherlands, which used to pride itself on progressive social liberalism, the anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders has joined the ruling coalition, which otherwise could not gain a majority in parliamentary. The bleached-blond provocateur is famed for proposing a "head rag tax", a ?1,000 (Dh5,000) licence for any Muslim woman who wants to wear a hijab. His Party of Freedom does not have any seats in the cabinet, but his influence will be felt in the coalition, which has promised to tighten immigration rules.
In Sweden, which has a generous asylum policy for Iraqis, the far-right Sweden Democrats won 20 seats in parliament, taking 5.7 per cent of the vote in last month's elections. This party has its roots in the Nazi fringe which has always existed in Sweden, hidden behind the smiling face of social democracy. Now it is a political force.
The reasons for this outburst of anti-immigrant feeling are less obvious than they might seem. For a start, Germany is no longer a country of immigration. Since the crash of 2008, it has seen a net outflow of perhaps 200,000 people a year.
So Germany is not being "overrun" by Muslim immigrants. If there is going to be an influx, it is by the millions of Poles, Romanians and Bulgarians who are gaining the right of freedom of movement around the 27 member states of the European Union.
Ultimately, the anti-Islam backlash is the public expression of western Europe's loss of confidence in its politicians, and its crumbling sense of identity and place in the globalised world. There is a realisation that power is shifting away to the East, to China and India, and that the comfortable social model of Europe cannot last. Muslims are the focus of this rage because they are most visible.
There is another reason this upsurge of anti-immigrant feeling should be treated with scepticism. The brutal truth is that Europe cannot thrive without immigration: its birth rate is too low to support a thriving economy.
Germany, Italy and Austria are at the bottom of the world's fertility table, along with Hong Kong and Singapore, where women seem to be too career-minded to have enough babies to replace the population. If the native European population cannot produce tomorrow's workers and tax-payers, then they will have to be imported. Some models predict that Germany's population, without immigration, could fall from 82 million now to 70 million in 2050 and to 24 million by 2100.
Already many European countries complain of a severe shortage of skilled engineers, scientists, computer programmers and other white-collar workers. German employers estimate that the inability to attract skilled immigrants is costing the country some ?15 billion a year.
Britain has the same problem. In response to the outcry over uncontrolled immigration, the government has imposed an interim cap on work visas from outside the European Union, ahead of a permanent limit next April. But this quota system has been imposed so rigidly that employers are claiming they cannot expand for lack of skilled staff.
One example highlights the dilemma. Two Russian-born scientists, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, working at Britain's Manchester University won this year's Nobel Prize for physics for their work on graphene, the thinnest material in the world. Under Britain's current regulations, young scientists such as these would not have qualified for work visas, as their pay would be too low. They would probably be in the US.
The challenge for the future is twofold: to find ways to attract immigrants with the right qualifications, and to address the neglect of the existing immigrant community, much of it from Turkey and the Arab world.
Past models of immigration have failed. For decades Germany saw its Turkish population as "guest workers" who would one day return. That was a fantasy. In Britain the state decided to muddle through, adopting the policy of multiculturalism, under which different communities would get along just fine if left to their own devices. For many immigrant communities, the result has been the creation of a neglected underclass, without the skills and education to challenge the racism of their host societies.
Europe is destined to be a continent of immigration. No politician ever won an election saying that, but Europe has to accept it and deal with the consequences. Turning a blind eye has led to the crisis between the people and the political crisis we see at the moment.
The issue is not perhaps as hard as it appears: if the headlines scream that 36 per cent of Germans feel their country is overrun with foreigners, actually they could say with equal justification that 64 per cent disagree with the alarmist scenario put to them by the pollsters. That is something to work on.
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