The practical test is whether America can reconcile openness with order—without sacrificing either. America’s appeal as a land of opportunity is proof of its success, not a reason to neglect its sovereignty. Those who seek to make it their home must respect its institutions and contribute to civic life. America, in turn, must remain faithful to its Constitution.
Europe offers a warning. America still has a choice. Its exceptionalism will endure only if it chooses, again and again, to be a republic of citizens rather than a collection of competing tribes.
Europe’s crisis of belonging offers a warning. America’s constitutional pluralism remains one of its greatest strategic strengths. The most dangerous lesson America could draw from Europe’s unrest is to mistake a failure of integration for a failure of immigration itself.
To understand these fractures, return to the years after World War II. Europe needed workers to rebuild, while many families in North Africa, Southern Europe and other economically vulnerable regions faced poverty, restricted opportunities, and sometimes the lingering effects of colonial rule. France recruited workers from North and West Africa; the United Kingdom attracted migrants from the Caribbean and South Asia; West Germany brought in guest workers from Turkey and elsewhere. For migrants, the journey promised dignity, security, and a better future for their children. For their hosts, it mainly answered an immediate economic need.
Those workers helped build postwar prosperity. Yet governments treated too many as temporary laborers, not future members of the nation. Families settled, children were born, and institutions were slow to adapt. Europe needed their work. It was less prepared to welcome their children as equals.
The current protests in France have many causes and should not be interpreted as a “Muslim uprising.” Yet Europe’s failure of integration has left some communities with an enduring sense of mistreatment and deep mistrust of institutions. That alienation matters, even as it cannot justify violence or explain every disturbance. The deeper question is how a democracy can confer citizenship while failing to cultivate a convincing sense of belonging.
In parts of Europe, children and grandchildren of immigrants—citizens by right—have often grown up in neighborhoods isolated from opportunity, attended disadvantaged schools, and faced suspicion despite their passports. Many prospered, but the gap between republican equality and daily reality remains consequential.
The failure is not simply a lack of secular education: France made that a defining republican commitment. Civic principles cannot become a shared identity through instruction alone. They must be experienced in classrooms, workplaces, and daily life. A child may memorize the republic’s values at school yet encounter closed doors in the labor market. That contradiction can nurture alienation without explaining or excusing violence.
Integration is reciprocal. A free society must insist on its laws, equality between women and men, freedom of conscience and democratic authority. No religious tradition grants an exemption. But the state must honor its side: equal rights, equal duties and opportunity. Equal citizenship must mean more than words on a passport.
The United States begins from a different proposition. Where European national identities often draw on shared ancestry and history, America has offered a more open, if imperfect, ideal: people of different origins can join one political community without surrendering their inherited identities.
That distinction is constitutional. The First Amendment protects religious freedom; the Fourteenth establishes citizenship and equal protection. The state owes its obligations to citizens whether Muslim, Christian, or Jewish. Allegiance to the Constitution—not adherence to a particular faith—is the essential civic bond.
I regard this openness as one of America’s greatest sources of power. It gives the United States a legitimacy difficult for its adversaries to imitate. When that principle weakens at home, American influence suffers abroad.
American history is hardly spotless. Slavery, segregation, exclusionary immigration laws, and suspicion of Muslims after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks reveal the gulf between ideals and conduct. Those failures make the constitutional promise more urgent, not less.
There is evidence that the promise works. In a 2017 Pew survey, 89 percent of Muslim Americans said they were proud to be both Muslim and American. In 2023–24, 42 percent identified with or leaned toward the Republican Party. They are participants in American politics, not a separate political caste.
Yet, Pew reported in 2026 that 43 percent of American adults considered Muslims less patriotic than other Americans. The contrast is revealing: the community’s attachment to the country is real, but so is the suspicion it encounters.
Antisemitism has also become an alarming feature of public life, sometimes disguised as geopolitical argument, sometimes expressed in ancient conspiracy theories. Jews should not have to doubt that institutions will protect them; Muslims should not have to prove their patriotism whenever a fanatic commits a crime. Both deserve equal protection.
The consequences extend beyond domestic harmony. A democracy able to unite people without erasing their differences strengthens its institutions at home and the credibility of its example abroad.
The practical test is whether America can reconcile openness with order—without sacrificing either.
Immigration is too consequential to become a permanent weapon in partisan politics. It concerns US national security, but also the country that hundreds of millions of Americans and their children will inherit. Both parties should seek a durable consensus grounded in the realities facing communities, employers, schools and border authorities: enforce the law, protect individual rights and preserve credible paths to legal immigration.
America’s appeal as a land of opportunity is proof of its success, not a reason to neglect its sovereignty. Those who seek to make it their home must respect its institutions and contribute to civic life. America, in turn, must remain faithful to its Constitution.
At its 250th anniversary, America should resist complacency. It is neither destined to repeat Europe’s mistakes nor immune to them. Its advantage is a constitutional language with which prejudice can be challenged, and strangers can become compatriots.
A republic can insist on one law without demanding one religion. It can protect a Jewish child from antisemitism and a Muslim child from bigotry while expecting both to uphold the same constitutional order.
The American Dream is larger than economic success. It is the belief that children need not be judged by their parents’ origins. That belief is a source of cohesion and strategic power.
Europe offers a warning. America still has a choice. Its exceptionalism will endure only if it chooses, again and again, to be a republic of citizens rather than a collection of competing tribes.
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