The Immigrant Threat: The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe Since 1850

Since the 1980s, anti-immigrant discourse has shifted away from the ‘color’ of immigrants to their religion and culture, focusing on newcomers from Muslim countries that are feared as terrorists and the products of tribal societies with values fundamentally opposed to those of secular western Europe. Leo Lucassen’s The Immigrant Threat tackles the question of whether it is reasonable to believe that the integration process of these new immigrants will indeed be fundamentally different in the long run (over multiple generations) from ones experienced by similar immigrant groups in the past.For comparison, Lucassen focuses on ‘large and problematic groups’ from western Europe’s past (the Irish in the United Kingdom, the Poles in Germany, and the Italians in France) and demonstrates a number of structural similarities in the way migrants and their descendants integrated into these nation states. The book emphasizes that the geographic sources of the ‘threat’ have changed and that contemporaries tend to over-emphasize the threat of each successive wave of immigrants, in part because the successfully incorporated immigrants of the past have become invisible in national histories. The book also includes a discussion of old and new migrants in the U.S. Leo Lucassen is an associate professor of social and economic history at the University of Amsterdam and the author of numerous books and articles in Dutch, German, and English.