When we speak of a race, then, we do not mean its expressions in art or in language, or its achievements in knowledge. We mean the moral and intellectual characters, which in their association make the soul of a race and which represent the product of all its past, the inheritance of all its ancestors. and the motives of all its conduct. The men of each race possess an indestructible stock of ideas, traditions, sentiments, modes of thought, and unconscious inheritance from their ancestors, upon which argument has no effect. What makes a race are their mental and, above all, their moral characteristics, the slow growth and accumulation of centuries of toil and conflict. These are the qualitites which determine their social efficiency as a people, which makes one race rise and another fall. . . .

Those qualities are moral far more than intellectual, and it is on the moral qualities of the English-speaking race that our history, our victories, and all our future rest. There is only one way in which you can lower those qualities or weaken those characteristics and that is by breeding them out. If a lower race mixes with a higher in sufficient numbers, history teaches us that the lower race will prevail. The lower race will absorb the higher, not the higher the lower, when the two strains appraoch wquality in numbers. In other words, there is a limit to the capacity of any race for assimilating and elevating and inferior race, and when you begin to pour in unlimited numbers of people of alien or lower races of less social efficiency and less moral force, you are running the most frightful risk that any people can run. The lowerin of a great race means not only its own decline but that of human civilization.

The Annals of America, Volume 12, 1895-1904: Populism, Imperialism and Reform. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1968. p. 91.

Sound familiar? It sounds very like the argument being made by John Rhys-Davis against the Muslim immigrants to Europe. Except it's one hundred years older than that. It was written by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who delivered his thoughts in a speech given before the Senate on March 16, 1896. His object: to pursuade his fellow Senators to restrict immigration before the immigrants polluted American culture and politics to the point that American identity would be lost forever. The immigrants he was attempting to restrict? Poles, Russians, and other eastern Europeans, especially Jews, fleeing famine and persecution; Italians, Greeks and other southern Europeans fleeing from political turmoil and poverty.

As we all know, the influx of these nationalities, with their primitive ways and refusal to adapt, and especially with their strange religion and their profligately large families, overthrew American society. After their arrival, they wiped out popular memory of the Declaration of Independence and everything it stood for. The Italians, in fact, those scions of a past heathen empire, sought to reestablish it and even invited the Pope to establish a theocracy in the former United States.

Well, in fact they did no such thing. They brought us pizza, borshct, pierogies and baklava, along with a new challenge to the American image of itself, which challenge we not only survived, but now revel in.

Before this wave of immigrants, the same kind of thing was said about the Famine Irish and the waves of German immigrants in the 1840s. To wit:

Sir, I disclaim all pretensions to "liberality" on this question, in which lies coiled up the futue happienss or misery of millions of unborn American citizens. We are now struggling for national character and national identity, and not for the meed of courtesy, or the extent of a generous dispostition. We stand now on the very verge of overthrow by the impetuous force of invading foreigners. Europe can no longer contain the growing population that is swelling her to bursting. She must disgorge it at any price, no matter what. Each hour will behold this tide of foreign immigration, rising higher and higher, growing stronger and stronger, and rushing bolder and bolder.

The Annals of America, Volume 7, 1841-1849: Manifest Destiny. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1968. p. 315-316.

The speaker this time wais Rep. Lewis C. Levin, a member of the Nativist party, to Congress on December 17, 1845. Note again the references to burgeoning population and the immanent threat to the nation.

The Germans and the Irish were seen as more acceptable by Sen. Lodge and his contemporaries because they were at least speaking something like English and were less swarthy.

America rose to these immigration challenges by providing the newcomers with ownership in the society to which they had moved, or been driven by poverty or persecution.

It will not be overnight, as much as our instant gratification imaginations would like it to be, but Muslims who wish to live in Europe may also become Europeans, but only if Europe is willing to treat them as if they belong there.