"My answer is clearly yes, it is a failure," he said in a television interview when asked about the policy which advocates that host societies welcome and foster distinct cultural and religious immigrant groups.
"Of course we must all respect differences, but we do not want... a society where communities coexist side by side.
"If you come to France, you accept to melt into a single community, which is the national community, and if you do not want to accept that, you cannot be welcome in France," the right-wing president said.
"The French national community cannot accept a change in its lifestyle, equality between men and women... freedom for little girls to go to school," he said.
"We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him," Sarkozy said in the TFI channel show.
Ex leaders of Australia (Howard) and Spain (Aznar) have made the same point.
So can policies change to reflect the change of heart at the top? Can the vast Euro-elites of culture and government mid-level types and media change to reflect this change of heart at the top?
I'm certainly pro-immigration. We are a nation of immigrants, for the most part. But I stand firmly on the side of setting the terms for that immigration. Opening the borders to bypass legal process and promoting multiculturalism that supports the ability of immigrants to remain in their own ghettos of living and thinking rather than becoming "American" in thought as past waves of immigrants eventually did (yes, it waited until the second or third generations but it happened).
As Europeans are forced to confront the effects of their multiculturalism in the aftermath of 9/11 (and their own experiences of terrorism in Madrid in London, as well as plots discovered elsewhere), why would we encourage multiculturalism here when we have had far more success in cultivating Americanization of immigrants here?
I've mentioned before that in my home town, I see Moslem women in head covers and flowing robes driving mini-vans to get their kids from school. Some may see the head covering as failing to assimilate, but ask any Islamist about the scenario and they'd call it beheading-worthy. Or the other day when I went to my bank and the bank employee handling my account wore a head cover yet shook my hand and made small talk and eye contact and all the other things you'd assume are normal here. The head covering notwithstanding, she is assimilating. Shoot, I had plenty of nuns for teachers when I was young who never showed their hair.
Mark Steyn sounded the alarm, and maybe pessimism about the trends is necessary to get people to change habits of thinking, but I never believed that the Europeans would glide serenely along the trend lines to their own destruction. Rulers speaking up are making concern about unassimilated Moslem immigrants vulnerable to calls from the old country to join the jihad acceptable and mainstream amongst the EU elites rather than a reason to prosecute that concern, suppress debate over that concern, and ostracize those who have that concern. This mainstreaming will also tend to undermine support for the extremist anti-immigrants who have been the only place for anti-multiculturalists to find a home to express their views.
