The Truth and the Lies About Islam in Europe

Fear Deserves an Answer Too

There is a very convenient way to discuss immigration in Europe: divide society into the reasonable and the frightened. On one side are those who know the data, understand demographics and know that Europe is not being “invaded”. On the other are those who spend too much time on social media, vote for the populist right and believe they will soon be living on a continent they no longer recognise.

The trouble is that things are rarely that simple.

A recent Economist article, published by Infobae under the title “The Truth and the Lies About Islam in Europe”, tries to dispel some of these fears. In many respects it is right. The idea of an inevitable demographic replacement belongs more to ideology than to demography.

But as I read it, an uncomfortable thought stayed with me: are we explaining to people what is happening, or are we choosing the figures that are most reassuring? Those are not the same thing.

The article says Muslims make up around 6% of a European population of more than 500 million. It immediately adds another reassuring fact: although immigrants initially tend to have more children than the native-born population, their fertility rates tend to converge with those of the rest of society after a couple of generations.

Fine. But one rather large variable is missing: immigration itself.

Germany is a useful example

Consider Germany. Official estimates put the Muslim population at around 6.4–6.7% in 2019. A more recent estimate puts it at roughly 8.0–8.5% in 2025. Using the midpoints, that is an increase of about 1.7 percentage points in six years.

Now make a deliberately simple calculation. If that pace continued — and I stress if — Germany would move from roughly 8.25% today to 9.7% in 2030, 11.1% in 2035, 12.5% in 2040 and around 14% in 2045. By about 2049 it would be close to 15%.

That is not a forecast. Nobody knows what German immigration will look like over the next twenty years. It may fall, rise or change completely in composition. But that is precisely the problem with the reassuring argument.

If we do not know how much immigration there will be, we cannot use future fertility convergence to imply that the Muslim share of the population will remain roughly where it is. Nor is 15% necessarily a ceiling. If immigration from Muslim-majority countries were to increase while Germany’s population continues to age and deaths exceed births, the percentage could rise beyond that level. If immigration fell substantially, the opposite could happen.

We do not know which scenario will occur. What we do know is that immigration policy matters.

The problem with talking only about fertility

Suppose a first-generation immigrant woman has more children than a German woman, and her daughters and granddaughters eventually have roughly the same number of children as other German women. Fine. But if new first generations continue to arrive in the meantime, the convergence of earlier generations does not automatically stop that population from growing.

It is like explaining how much water enters and leaves a bathtub while talking only about the drain. Fertility is one variable. Immigration is another. And there is a third: Germany has an ageing population and a negative natural balance. If the rest of the population shrinks while particular groups grow, their share increases even if their fertility is converging.

So saying “Muslims are only about 6% of Europe today and their fertility will converge” may be statistically correct while still giving an incomplete picture of the issue that worries part of the population.

Nobody lives in a European average

Nobody lives in “Europe”. People live in Berlin, Birmingham, Blackburn, Brussels, Marseille or Münster. Immigrant populations are not spread evenly. The article itself mentions Blackburn, where Muslims account for more than 60% of the population in some wards and more than 80% in two.

A European average of 6% can be perfectly accurate and still describe very poorly the everyday experience of somebody living in particular neighbourhoods. When that person hears, “What are you worried about? They are only 6%,” he is unlikely to feel that his reality is being explained. He feels it is being denied. That is ideal fuel for populists.

Integration also has a speed

There is another question we rarely ask: is a society’s capacity to integrate newcomers unlimited? There is no magic number. We cannot say Germany can integrate 300,000 people a year but not 400,000. Yet it is equally unreasonable to pretend that numbers, concentration and speed do not matter.

An immigrant family whose children enter a school where the overwhelming majority of classmates speak German is exposed every day to the language and norms of the receiving society. What happens when most pupils in a school come from immigrant families? Nothing bad necessarily happens. But the mechanism has changed.

For integration to take place, there has to be something to integrate into. If immigration in certain neighbourhoods happens faster than interaction between newcomers and the receiving population, increasingly self-contained communities can emerge. People can work, shop, study, marry and socialise predominantly within their own group.

Then a paradox appears: people who are perfectly integrated economically but much less integrated culturally.

And here the article offers another remarkably uncomfortable figure. According to the survey it cites, 41% of British Muslims under 35 believe violence can be justified when someone insults the Prophet Muhammad. Among older Muslims the figure is 25%. Let us take those numbers exactly as the article presents them. If the passage of time and generations automatically produced integration into liberal values, we would expect precisely the opposite.

So why is the right growing?

Of course xenophobia exists. Racism exists. And there is a political industry that turns every crime committed by an immigrant into evidence of a supposed invasion. But explaining the entire rise of AfD, the Rassemblement National and similar movements in those terms is too easy.

Some voters are saying something different: “I do not know how far this process will go, and I no longer trust the people who tell me I have no reason to worry.” When institutions answer that concern by offering only reassuring numbers, distrust grows.

Taking that fear seriously does not mean agreeing with it.

The real debate is not 6% versus 15%

It would be just as irresponsible to replace one simplification with another. We do not know that Germany will have a 15% Muslim population in twenty years. Still less do we know that it will exceed that figure.

What we can say is more important. If the approximate change between the 2019 and 2025 estimates continued, Germany would approach 15% by the end of the 2040s. If immigration from Muslim-majority countries increased, it could get there sooner or move beyond that percentage. If immigration fell, it could remain considerably below it.

The political question therefore cannot simply be how many Muslims there will be. It is this: what volume and pace of immigration can a society absorb while keeping its mechanisms of integration working? Asking that question is not xenophobia. And saying fertility will converge after two generations does not answer it.

Europe may need immigrants. It can offer refuge to the persecuted. It can be culturally and economically enriched by those who arrive. All of that can be true at the same time. But it can also decide how many people arrive, how, when and under what conditions. A democratic immigration policy is not simply about opening or closing a door. It is about retaining the ability to regulate it.

Perhaps one of the great mistakes of European democracies has been to assume that acknowledging fear of immigration strengthens populists. The opposite may be true. What strengthens populism is leaving it a monopoly over the questions everyone else is afraid to ask.

And that, in the end, is the thought the article left me with. It is not enough to show that some of the most alarmist prophecies about Islam are false. We also have to explain, with the same honesty, what we know, what we do not know, and how much of tomorrow’s Europe will depend on the immigration decisions we make today.