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These are not the hard-working economic immigrants of old; this is a whole new type of immigrant, and America must address the change soon.
In Wednesday’s Pluralism Is Broken, I argued that pluralism only works when cultural differences operate within a shared civic framework. Multiculturalism reverses that premise by asking America to accommodate differences without requiring assimilation. When immigration policy no longer reinforces a common framework—and when we become unwilling to examine its consequences—we are not preserving pluralism; we have sown the seeds of our own destruction.
The central question is whether a society committed to individual liberty can remain coherent when it loses the will to reject individuals or groups whose norms contradict its foundational values. Over time, we have deliberately bent our rules to accommodate two categories: those who come here solely for economic reasons and those who seem to come in a spirit of religious conquest.
Economic migration has existed since the nation’s founding, but two modern developments transformed it from beneficial to detrimental: easier entry from around the globe and a benefits system that attracts those seeking opportunity regardless of their ability to contribute.
That created a second, more complex challenge: the arrival of migrants whose religious framework is not merely a set of private beliefs but a complete system governing how believers live, their obligations to others, and a requirement to proselytize or even conquer—and that makes welfare not a gift, but a mandate from the new host country.
Classical Islamic scholarship draws this distinction through ibādāt—acts of worship governing the relationship between God and the believer—and muʿāmalāt—rules governing relationships among human beings, including family, inheritance, commerce, sexuality, and community life. Islam is not merely a faith; it also prescribes how believers must live and what to believe. Devout Muslims accept these obligations as divinely mandated, not optional. The concept of the ummah reinforces this: believers are members of a religiously defined community with obligations toward one another that extend across national boundaries.
In a religiously tolerant country like ours, we have no natural immune system to fend off a culture with a high birth rate that frequently rejects assimilation. This leads to an unavoidable question: whose culture will survive? This unprecedented question demands that we rethink our laws and beliefs while we still can.
The problem is not that Muslims are different; America has always absorbed differences. The question is whether those differences encompass fundamentally exclusionary ideas. America’s original social compact was built around the individual. The people who came here differed in nationality, language, and denomination, but generally shared a recognizable conception of society: individual liberty bounded by responsibility, private property, family, voluntary association, rule of law, and government constrained by citizens’ rights. We need not be homogeneous; we need only function within the same framework.
Islam is different. Muslims may understand and practice their faith differently, but Islamic obligations encompass family, inheritance, commerce, sexuality, charity, and relationships with the broader community. A religious obligation is different from a cultural preference. One can abandon a custom; abandoning a religious obligation can be understood as violating God’s commandments.
That confronts an American assumption: that religion can be neatly separated from civic life. And it raises the question America increasingly avoids: What happens when religious obligation and the American civic can no longer be reconciled?