If I want to get my blood pressure up, I can always listen to rightwing talk radio. But today I was listening to NPR's "The Diane Rehm Show"and -- WHOO DOGGIE! -- my blood pressure was off the charts.
One discussion on the show today was about Muslims and "multiculturalism" in Europe and how it related to 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik's murder of 76 people in Norway last week. All of the pundits on the show seemed to agree on one fact: that Muslims just don't assimilate when they immigrate to "traditionally secular and culturally tolerant European" countries.
People driving other cars on the highway might have thought it was my radiator overheating when they saw the steam coming out of my car as it pulled over to the shoulder, but it was my head.
Let me give a little admittedly anecdotal information about why some immigrants do not "assimilate" into their new cultures.
I was married for a kabillion jillion years to a Turk. Some of his family lived in Turkey, and some lived as Gastarbeiter ("guest workers") in Austria and Germany. His sister, for instance, made shoes at one of those "living history" attractions in Austria. A brother-in-law worked in a concrete factory in Frankfurt until his back was crushed in an industrial accident. Cousins had moved to Austria and Germany many years earlier to help those countries rebuild in the decades after WWII.
Visits to his family involved travel through several countries as we made our way from Germany to Turkey. We stayed with various siblings, cousins, aunts/uncles, and others along the way.
In the 1980s, we made our first trip to Salzburg, Austria. I imagined a magical Bavarian wonderland, the home of Mozart and the von Trapp family, a place filled with museums and libraries and amazing places to visit.
And so it was. For me, anyway. For my husband, it was a whole other experience. Our first eye-opener was when we went to a bank to exchange US dollars for Austrian currency. My husband stood in line, his U.S. passport in hand, but the tellers appeared not to see him. They gestured instead for me to approach the counter. I was puzzled and ushered my husband forward. The teller indicated that she would not serve him; she would serve me.
Odd.
My husband's sister and her family lived in a two-room apartment in a ramshackle part of Salzburg. These were the living quarters of the Gasterbeiter who worked for the businesses that hired them. Their apartment had no hot water, and there was one bathroom in the entire apartment complex for eight families. The two-room apartment across the hall was home to eight family members. The little girls of the family worked throughout the day knitting, tatting, crocheting handicrafts that were sold to tourists. Some of these girls were as young as 5 and 6.
Some blocks away were other apartment buildings, much nicer and with modern conveniences. But my sister-in-law explained that Turks weren't allowed to live there. I thought perhaps I misunderstood her Turkish and let it pass.
We took the family out to dinner the day after we arrived. But my husband's sister told us that we couldn't eat at the first restaurant we stopped at, because they didn't serve Turks. Huh? That didn't seem possible to me, but when everyone surrendered to the ignorant American woman who didn't believe them and obligingly went inside with me, we just never got served. Other people came in after us and were seated and fed, but we were told that there was no room for us. After an hour of counting the empty tables that were never given up to us, I finally admitted they were right. I simply had to experience it to believe it, and I give his family so much honor for their tolerance with me.
While traveling from Austria to Germany, we had to go through the usual border rigamarole common at that time. All of the Turkish-looking people in the car were told to get out of the van, but my daughter and I (both light-complected and with blue eyes) were told we should stay in the van and be comfortable. The Turks were rigorously frisked, and the border guards had dogs come over and sniff them thoroughly. This was incredibly humiliating, particularly for the women in our party, whom the border guards took delight in ordering the dogs over and over again to sniff.
The whole time, my daughter and I were treated very politely and told that everything was fine with us; it was just the others they were interested in.
This type of differentiated treatment was repeated at other border crossings.
My ex-husband took to wearing his U.S. passport in the front pocket of his jacket, so that the words "United States of America" always showed. It helped a little, but not much.
I grew to loathe these visits to Salzburg, Vienna, and Frankfurt.
Things just seemed to get worse over the years. The hatred of Turks festered, and there were many attacks on Turkish individuals and Turkish social clubs (necessary because Turks weren't allowed into many nightclubs, restaurants, or other entertainment venues). The Turks we knew were terrified of moving out of the Gasterbeiter ghettos; the danger of being attacked was just too much to face on their own. It was much better to live relatively safely with people they knew and could trust.
As anti-Turkish (and anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant) violence grew through the 1990s and early 2000s, many of my husband's family members eventually gave up and came back to Turkey. But sometimes they no longer spoke the same style of Turkish as their family back home or there were other reasons that the transition was difficult for them. My husband's sister and her family never did go back to Turkey, as my sister-in-law gave birth to twin girls, one of whom was born without arms and with only one leg. In Austria, she had good medical care that coordinated with her education -- something that wasn't possible in her home neighborhood in Turkey for a low-income family with a child with multiple handicaps.
I've heard so many similar stories from so many immigrants over the years. A Bosnian friend who fled Sarajevo in 1992 in a harrowing escape has skipped around Europe from Austria to Germany to Norway to Netherlands -- but he can never seem to overcome the fact that he has a Muslim name. He's been denied housing in "integrated" areas, denied work, been beaten up by a group of young men who called him a "filthy Muslim."
In the Netherlands, a female friend originally from Turkey cried when she told me that her employer ripped the scarf off her head and told her she was not permitted to wear it if she wanted to work there.
When I did volunteer work in Bosnia, I heard story after story from Bosnians who had escaped to other parts of Europe during the war, only to return to their war-ravaged homeland because they were as hounded out of their new countries as they had been by the Serbs. "At least the Serbs showed their guns right away," one man told me. "In Norway, you didn't know who wanted you dead. You just knew someone did."
So why do immigrants "fail to assimilate"? Because assimilation is not just difficult but potentially deadly. Attacks on Turkish ghettos, murders of immigrants, burnings of immigrant-owned businesses, public humiliation and contempt ... who would choose that over the relative peace of living with people who respect you and open their doors to you? Who won't mind being one of the 60 people who share a bathroom with you? Who'll share food with you without spitting at you?
You'll hear all kinds of scary stories about how Muslims are "taking over" this place and that place. How their birth rates are threatening the non-Muslim cultures that heretofore were in the majority.
But what you won't hear is the humanity that has to be surrendered when you're forced to immigrate to another country, another culture. When you have no choice but to live "with your own kind" in forgotten ghettos because you fear the people who claim they fear you.