After America - Mark Steyn [146]
But this was being penny-wise and pound-blasé. When 57 percent of Pakistani Britons were married to first cousins, and another 15 percent were married to relatives, and a fair number of those cousin couples were themselves the children of cousins, it surely signaled that at the very minimum this community was strongly resistant to traditional immigrant assimilation patterns. Of course, in any society, certain groups are self-segregating: the Amish, the Mennonites, and so on. But when that group is not merely a curiosity on the fringe of the map but the principal source of population growth in all your major cities, the challenge posed by that self-segregation is of a different order.
A combination of entitlements and demography would cripple much of the developed world both fiscally and physically. The new Europe is sickly, and its already unsustainable health systems have buckled under the strain. Unless you are in the government nomenklatura, or a member of an approved identity group with an effective lobbying organization, or a celebrity, “universal access to quality health care” means universal access to an ever lengthier, ever more bureaucratically chaotic waiting list.
As for the aging native populations, they were the ones who found it increasingly difficult to self-segregate. There was an entertaining Swedish public health professor called Hans Rosling who liked to use his “Trendalyzer” software to present zippy four-minute demographic computerizations of how the world had progressed over the last two centuries.28 He used to pop up on YouTube back before the “gatekeeping” or whatever euphemism the Chinese owners now use for their “family-friendly filtering.” Professor Rosling produced fun stuff, showing how Botswana by 2010 had advanced, on major socioeconomic indicators, to where Portugal once was, and how Singapore had overtaken Scandinavia. But it would have been interesting to see him apply his Trendalyzer to parts of his own country. Founded as a dock for the Archbishop of Lund, Malmö was one of the first Christian cities in Denmark. In our time it would become the first Muslim city in Sweden. In the old days, around 2011, 2012, I sat and had a coffee in a nice little place in a beautiful medieval square in the heart of town. Aside from a few modernist excrescences, it would not have looked so different in the early days of the Lutheran church. I got lucky, and fell into conversation with a couple of young Swedes. Fine-looking ladies. They’re not entirely extinct, not quite, but already I miss Nordic blondes. At dusk, and against their advice, I took a 20-minute walk to Rosengard. As one strolled the sidewalk, the gaps between blondes grew longer, and the gaps between fierce, bearded Muslim men grew shorter. And then eventually you were in the housing projects, and all the young boys kicking a soccer ball around were Muslim, and every single woman was covered—including many who came from “moderate” Muslim countries and did not adopt the headscarf or hijab until they emigrated to Sweden, where it was de rigeur, initially in Rosengard but increasingly throughout. Even then, ambulances and fire trucks did not respond to emergency calls without police escort. What was the rationalization Israel used at the Oslo Accords? “Land for peace”? In Sweden, about as far as you can get from Gaza and the West Bank, they would also trade land for peace, and wound up with neither. The Jews were the first to flee Malmö: soon it was just another