Posner responds to Krugman's family values

Two posts down from this, I point to and quote from a Krugman op-ed. Posner takes issue with what he believes is a significant omission from Krugman's analysis. Posner's hypothesis is that European policy deters competition and, hence, impedes assimilation of immigrants. Such barriers, Posner argues, act to provide a breeding ground for terrorists. In Posner's words "The less fluid, less competitive, less market-oriented, and indeed less materialistic (the only color important to businessmen is green) a national economy is, the less opportunity it will provide to alien entrants." From this he concludes that the cost of such policy (think 9/11, Madrid and London bombings) outweigh the benefit (think 3-hour midday siestas, and monthlong vacations on the Cote d'Azur). Ok, I had the same initial reaction. However, once you get over this urge to kick Posner's ass, you come to realize that he makes some interesting and valid points. Excerpt:

Krugman's failure to relate the European model to Europe's Muslim problem is telling...The assimilation of immigrants by the United States, compared to the inability of the European nations to assimilate them--with potentially catastrophic results for those nations--is not unrelated to the differences between economic regulation in the United States and Europe. Because the U.S. does not have a generous safety net--because it is still a nation in which the risk of economic failure is significant--it tends to attract immigrants who have values conducive to upward economic mobility, including a willingness to conform to the customs and attitudes of their new country. And because the U.S. does not have employment laws that discourage new hiring or restrict labor mobility (geographical or occupational), immigrants can compete for jobs on terms of substantial equality with the existing population. Given the highly competitive character of the U.S. economy, in contrast to the economies of Europe, employers cannot afford to discriminate against able workers merely because they are foreign and perhaps do not yet have a good command of English. By the second generation, most immigrant families are fully assimilated, whatever their religious beliefs or ethnic origins...

Thus, it is not poverty that breeds extremism; it is social policies intended in part to eradicate poverty that do so, by obstructing exit from minority subcultures. If Muslims in European societies do not feel a part of those societies because public policy does not enable them to compete for the jobs held by non-Muslims--if instead, excluded from identifying with the culture of the nation in which they reside they perforce identify with the worldwide Muslim culture--some of them are bound to adopt the extremist views that are common in that culture. The resulting danger to Europe and to the world is not offset by long vacations.

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