At some point in the 1980s....immigrant integration across all of Europe hit a peak. Few grasp this or realize the long-term impact.
Up until the 1970s....when you were arriving into a country....you were going to be forced in various ways to integrate. No more peer support. No more TV from your home-country. No more newspapers from the home-country. No religious support. You could look across Europe and see the same arrange program in almost every single country.
Then, things started to change....with technology being the key.
Satellite TV gave everyone an option in the 1980s to watch programming from your home-country. So a guy from Algeria could arrive in France and find that he had the language and news from the home-country.
As time went by, newspapers in the home-language started to pop up in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, etc. A guy from Turkey could read a daily newspaper, in his own language.
Over the past decade, the internet has brought connections to the home-country to a high level.
It doesn't matter what country you come from.....or what European country you arrive in.....you simply don't have to deal with full-up integration anymore. You can do a half-ass job and marginally just get by with 500 words of the local language, and just pretend your way through a stable life.
When you look at problems in France, Germany, Sweden, etc.....these are all people disconnected from the country that they are living in. They know about the politics of their home-country, than the the country that they adopted. They know more about daily activity of their home-country, than their region that they live in today.
Journalists rarely talk about this. I sat last year and was watching a Swedish news piece and they were talking about all the satellite dishes on the apartment buildings....which were pointed not at Swedish TV satellites, but at the satellite of their home-country.
Fixing this? No, once you opened the technology genie....you sealed the the problem in a complete vacuum. You can't undo the mess at hand.
When you have some kid of an immigrant couple who has completed ten to twelve years in the new land and he is still totally disconnected from the new land.....there is something wrong.
It's interesting to go back to the 1800s and the American mid-west...to where all of these Swedes and Norwegians showed up and they had no choice.....but to adapt to the region, and learn the language. Today? If Swedes were to arrive in the American mid-west? They'd probably put up a satellite dish and arrange for a daily newspaper in their own language. Integration would not occur, and fifty years down the line, you'd admit that there was a problem brewing.
Solutions? That's the question. I doubt if any politician wants to really grapple with this or make it a public problem.
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