Originally Posted by
Nymrohd
Integration is not about aid, access to labor or education. It's about Identity.
The USA has a supreme advantage when it comes to integrating immigrants. The national identity of the US is ideological; not ethnic. While many have tried to make it the latter (white supremacists), the fact remains that to be American is to believe in certain principles.
The UK has a similar though lesser advantage; it's broad and inclusive colonial past. Unlike France, the UK treated its colonies with some level of enlightenment and imported people from those colonies broadly for decades as something other than indentured servants. Thus any member of a Commonwealth country (or protected territory) can credibly integrate in the UK.
Europe however is a continent of nation states. Almost all have a clear ethnic majority, their history is the history of that ethnic majority and less the history of the country. This is fundamentally exclusionary to immigrants. You can stay in Germany for generations but you can never be German because it is an ethnic designation first, not a national one. When an immigrant faces a complete barrier to integration and is unable to truly feel that they belong, it is only natural that they will double back on their own culture. Combine this with the unquestionable effect of nostalgia that leads almost all immigrants to lionize their home culture and whitewash the very real fact that if their culture was greater then they wouldn't be immigrating in the first place and you end up with ghettos since these people, like all of us, need a group to belong. And since they can never belong to the ethnic majority, they consciously become minorities.