I can remember the first Pakistanis (which at that time included Bangladeshis) showing up in England. They weren’t much liked: As people have been noticing since Chaucer’s time, the English just don’t care for foreigners.
There were some unpleasant “Paki jokes” going round in the late 1960s. It was distaste for people with strange habits, though; there was no element of fear.
As the first generation settled in, a grudging acceptance developed. The local corner shop was taken over by a family from Pakistan, who seemed nice enough; and the fast-food place on the next block did a lovely chicken curry. I can’t recall anyone even thinking that there were Islamic terrorists in Britain’s future.
So there’s a lesson: Mass non-European immigration into the West has highly unpredictable consequences. The mass immigration of Muslims, in particular, seems like a really bad idea.
***
Question: if John Derbyshire didn’t already work at National Review, as a veteran writer of many years, no less — would he be hired today?
I like anglophones and I like francophones but, if I were designing a jurisdiction from scratch, I wouldn’t include large numbers of both on the same patch of land. Not because they’ll be killing each other but because it’s a significant impediment to civic cohesion — because, for most people, it will mean you can’t share the same jokes, the same cultural allusions. (…)
Islam is bilingualism on steroids. (…)
I can’t understand why any society would lightly volunteer to become semi-Muslim – which is what in effect Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany et al have done.
***
Oh, and about that bilingualism thing?
A woman in Eastern Ontario who has been working as the local postmistress for the town of Pakenham has been told she will keep her job, this after being told on Friday that she would lose it, which came a week after being told she would keep it, after being told she would lose it.
The reason for all this confusion, Jeanne Barr does not speak French. (…)
All of this to ensure linguistic harmony in a village that has no significant Francophone population, it is a move only a bureaucracy could love. Were this my neighbourhood in Ottawa South, where there is a large French speaking population, then bilingual staff would only make sense. In Pakenham it does not. Those objecting to this are sure to be called bigots, anti-French, accused of being opposed to the core Canadian value of bilingualism. What they are speaking out in favour of is common sense.
