Review: The Myth of the Muslim Tide - Do Immigrants Threaten the West? by Doug Saunders

As one of my New Year’s Resolutions I decided to read more non-fiction this year, more specifically 12 non-fiction books. I picked this one as one of them because I don’t like the way the public debate has been conducted lately. There seems to be a lot of hate and intolerance and people try to justify it with “facts” apparently pulled out of almost thin air. 

This book promises to take a hard look at these “facts” and refute most if not all of them, and unlike the propagators of the hateful speech, it actually backs up its claims. Granted this does get a little boring sometimes, but this is the stuff we need to refute the haters, so I definitely think it’s worth it to power through. And it really isn’t that bad. Saunders does a good job of giving us enough numbers to back up his claims and then adding a meaningful context to those numbers. 

In the first part of the book Saunders takes the claims made by anti-immigrant, anti-muslim people and refutes them one by one. There is really no arguing with these facts. In the latter part of the book he gives us a background of immigration history to help us understand that there is no muslim tide about to engulf our lands. He shows how the fear was the same in the past with the large immigrations of Catholics and Jews, and how these populations have now all assimilated into the societies in which they live, and why we should have some confidence that the more recent waves of immigrants will do the same eventually. 

He doesn’t say we should just sit back and stop worrying and that assimilation will happen automatically. There are definitely things to be improved and it does take work from both sides to make sure assimilation happens in a satisfying and constructive way. In this edition there are two added chapters on the European crisis and returning Jihad warriors. Again he shows us that the situation is not as dire as portrayed by some fear mongering people, but at the same time advises us to pay attention to the minority that could become a problem. 

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who either already has a formed opinion, one way or the other, or who wants to gather some facts to form an opinion. If you have already made up your mind this might either change it or give you some facts to support it, and if you are looking for more facts before forming an opinion this will definitely be a good place to start. 

I gave this book 4 stars out of 5 on Goodreads, simply because the numbers would be a bit boring sometimes. But as I said they are needed, and I don’t really see how he could have done without them.