Thanks for your detailed response to my comment, Mr. Movsesyan.

Here are a few more thoughts in response to your questions/comments:

First, regarding the issue of mainstream Muslim attitudes, you caution that “extrapolating national attitudes for millions of people based on the responses of a few thousand respondents can be misleading (the chief reason why I avoided implying anything about ethnic groups from the naturalization surveys). Likewise, speaking generally of an ethnic/religious group when your own data shows great variation can lead to mischaracterization, like the fact that fewer than 10% of Azerbaijani Muslim respondents supported Sharia law and polygamy in the Pew Survey that you cite.”

Surveys and polls inherently carry the risk of being unrepresentative, but beyond the general notion that any survey might be misleading, if we want to suggest that a particular survey is misleading, then we have an obligation to explain why that might be the case. The mere fact that we are extrapolating from the responses of thousands of people to the attitudes of many millions of people is not, in itself, a reason to doubt the survey results, of course. This is inevitably how surveys have to be done. And the results of the Pew survey I cited, which is broadly representative in spanning many nations, are pretty compelling. Even if the statistics described were, in reality, overstated or not quite as stark as the responses would suggest, we still would have reason to be concerned. In other words, imagine that the finding that more than nine in ten of the world’s Muslims believe a woman’s role is always to oblige and obey her husband (http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-exec/) is not correct and that, in fact, the real number is only eight in ten, or seven or six in ten. This remains troubling, does it not? Or take the statistic that 51% of Muslims in the U.S. would want the option of being governed by shariah law rather than the U.S. Constitution, and nearly 20% would support the use of violence to make shariah the law of the land (http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2015/06/23/nationwide-poll-of-us-muslims-shows-thousands-support-shariah-jihad/). Again, even if there was a massive error here and the real numbers were not 51% and 20%, but rather, only half of that (25% and 10%), this would still be a noteworthy concern. My point is that these are real issues that cannot be dismissed. They cannot be wished away with facile rejoinders offered by some (though not by you) that such “extremist” positions are not representative of mainstream Muslims. Rather, we have to ask the question, first asked (to my knowledge) by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies, of how far we need to bend over backwards to tolerate those who, if tolerated, would not tolerate us.

Your point about the differentiation between nations such as Azerbaijan where Muslims tend to be more moderate and nations such as Saudi Arabia where they tend to be more “hard-line” in their attitudes is an important caution to keep in mind, I think. Indeed, Muslims from the former Soviet Republics generally tend to be more moderate, though the Wahhabi strain of Islam is spreading there as well. And such nuanced differentiation should obviously inform immigration policy.

You then write this:

If an immigrant does not espouse many “Western beliefs” because of cultural influence and/or propaganda in their native countries, does that therefore mean they can’t acclimate and appreciate Western culture after arriving to the U.S.? The U.S. government historically thought this was possible, which is one of the reasons why naturalization today continues to require that immigrants live as permanent residents for at least 5 years, giving them sufficient time (theoretically) to assimilate, both culturally and linguistically.

My response is that they can acclimate and appreciate Western culture, but this takes time and effort on both our part and theirs. The U.S., thus far, has been spared the worst consequences of this issue because, in contrast to some of the nations of Europe, we have thus far proceeded more slowly and cautiously in admitting Muslims. But witness what happened in Rotherdam, England. Witness the calamitous consequences of Angela Merkel’s disastrous admission of a flood of some one million inadequately vetted Muslim migrants to Germany and the resulting spate of sexual assaults by 2,000 Muslim men against 1,200 German women in Cologne, Hamburg and other German cities. Witness the deplorable state of the Muslim ghettos in the banlieues of France and Belgium, which you can read about it more detail here and here. In France, for instance, though Muslims comprise an estimated 7.5% of the population, they account for an estimated 60% of the prison population, numbers that make the over-representation of African-Americans in our own prisons look positively benign by comparison. Speaking more anecdotally, in the Ditmas Park and Kensington neighborhoods in Brooklyn, which I walk through several times per week, there has been, in the past few years, a stark increase in the number of Pakistani Muslims, but more specifically, a stark increase in the number of mosques and number of women wearing full burqas, hijabs and niqabs, where it used to be the case only a few years back that I would almost never pass by women dressed in this fashion, whereas now, I do so every time I am in the neighborhood. It is reasonable to surmise that a Muslim woman who walks around with only her eyes uncovered to the world is more likely to have beliefs — and to live with others who have beliefs — generally incompatible with our Western ideals of gender equality and the like. My point is simple: integration takes work. If a nation admits too many people with attitudes incompatible with those that prevail here and allows them to settle in ethnic or religious ghettos, the predictable result is going to be the nurturing of hotbeds of cultural insularity, crime and extremism.

This is my response, as well, to this question of yours: “But if you believe — and to be clear, there is no evidence that you do — that stricter cultural screening should be installed in the vetting process, then I would be interested in any definitive proof of a failure of cultural assimilation for Muslim and/or other immigrant groups (like a peer-reviewed study or methodologically-sound survey that compares these groups’ political and cultural beliefs before and after settling in the U.S.).” The proof of a failure of cultural assimilation is currently all over Europe, as I described above, is it not? The Muslim population in the U.S. is still comparatively small, still under 1% of the U.S. population. If it ever approaches the 5% of Germany or England, the 6% of Belgium (a whopping 25% of Brussels) or the 7.5% of France, then we’ll be dealing with a very different reality, as the experience of these nations attests.

And this brings me to my second point about the importance of skilled, educated immigrants, which I believe to be inextricably intertwined with the first point. You see, I believe firmly that we should admit Muslim immigrants alongside all other kinds of immigrants. But I believe the people we need to admit, both Muslim and non-Muslim, should be skilled and educated immigrants. This is for a very simple reason. People with skills and education and gainful employment are, for obvious reasons, far less likely to go around sexually assaulting women, far less likely to become extremists or terrorists and far more likely to integrate successfully into the general population and into the prevailing norms of American culture rather than subsisting in insular ghettos. Thus, not only will a merit-based immigration system address the oncoming technological crisis that is already eliminating unskilled jobs from our economy but it will also simultaneously address the issue of integration that is your principal concern. This is why I believe any analysis of integration and assimilation needs to address this issue, and it is why I brought it up in responding to the excellent and detailed article that you wrote.