If you want to know what mass immigration without assimilation produces in a country, look no further than Scotland. Immigrants from Pakistan now constitute an ethno-religious voting bloc in that country with their very own politicians advocating for nakedly sectarian interests.
Recently, a video clip from 2022 resurfaced on social media of Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar standing in front of the flag of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan claiming that “change is coming” and forthrightly calling for ethnic and Muslim sectarianism in Scottish politics. Sarwar doesn’t mince words: He wants his people to take control of every level of government in Scotland.
“We will only truly get real power, not if we just have more Pakistanis sitting in council chambers and parliaments, but actually having more Pakistanis and South Asians sitting in the corridors of power making the decisions,” said Sarwar.
He went on to declare that the days where “our South Asian community are viewed as a vote bank or a curry bank are well and truly gone. The days where South Asian communities get to lead political parties and get to lead countries is now upon us. The days when South Asian communities get to decide not just at which school our children go to but what they are taught in those schools, is also coming.”
There’s a lot to unpack in his statement. No mention of the Scottish people, or Britain, or any shared national interests or a common good. It was simply an assertion of raw power for his ethnic and religious group over and against all others. It was a call to take over institutions.
Notice, too, the identitarian language. When Sarwar says that the time has come for “South Asian communities” (a euphemism for Pakistani Muslim immigrants) to “lead countries,” he doesn’t mean lead countries in South Asia. He means the time has come for Pakistani Muslims to lead the countries they have culturally and politically colonized through mass immigration — in this case, Scotland and England.
This is sobering stuff, and the main takeaway is that multiculturalism has produced a particularly toxic form of ethno-religious factionalism in Britain that will eventually tear the country apart. Sarwar and his people intend to take over Scotland, and if they can, all of Britain. They are being forthright about it. The vision they have for Britain is shaped primarily by the Islamic religion and Pakistani culture. It is incompatible with and essentially hostile towards British civilization, and Sarwar knows it.
What’s happening in Scotland and England should serve as a cautionary tale for America. Despite what the left claims, multiculturalism doesn’t produce “strength through diversity,” or a common civic culture of shared interests, or any other such platitudes. It produces what we see in Britain and much of Europe: an aggressive species of identity politics which, under conditions of mass immigration from non-western societies, ends up importing entire communities whose customs and way of life are inimical to that of the host country.
For example, when someone like Sarwar talks about the “South Asian community” getting to decide what’s taught in Scottish schools, what he means is that Muslim immigrants from Pakistan will soon get to decide the curriculum — not just for their children but for all schoolchildren in Scotland.
Once they have that power, does anyone seriously think they will refrain from imposing an Islamist agenda, not just in schools but in society at large? Of course they won’t. Sarwar’s own father, Mohammed Sarwar, the first Muslim MP elected in the United Kingdom, gave up his UK citizenship in 2013 to go back to Pakistan and become governor of Punjab. He later called for Islamic blasphemy laws to be promulgated through the United Nations and the European Union.
Despite his stint in the British Parliament, the senior Sarwar never really assimilated to the West. In that, he was typical of his immigrant “community” in Britain: He was never really British. He was always first and foremost a Pakistani Muslim, and hence had no problem using the West’s liberalism to call for the imposition of Islamic dhimmitude and the destruction of liberal society in the West. Multiculturalism allows for this sort of thing, after all, under the misguided notion that diversity and tolerance of imported cultures must be limitless.
But tolerating this kind of foreign sectarianism is national suicide, as anyone can easily observe in Scotland and England, which are now on a probably irreversible trajectory toward civil war. We in America should pay attention because the same thing is happening here, albeit on a smaller scale. Parts of Michigan, for example, now have such concentrations of unassimilated Muslim immigrants that scenes like this have become a commonplace — mass demonstrations of Muslim identity that are fundamentally alien to our American way of life. We saw plenty of that in the pro-Hamas demonstrations that arose immediately after the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, and we will keep seeing it as these unassimilated immigrant communities grow and ethno-religious sectarianism becomes a normal part of political life in America.
Democrats, for their part, have embraced this sort of sectarianism. Some, like Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, do so openly. Omar very clearly puts her Somali ethnicity first and sees her job in Congress as representing the interests of Somali and its people, whether in Minnesota or East Africa.
Or consider Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas, who issued a statement Monday in response to a simple executive order from the Trump White House that all truck drivers must speak English. This, said Castro, was a “targeted attack on the Spanish-speaking community,” and would “lead to more racial profiling and prevent hard-working Americans from participating in our economy and transportation industry.”
Embedded in this way of speaking is the idea that any requirement that “hard-working Americas” speak English is somehow an “attack” on them, as if even having a national official language in America is itself racist or bigoted.
We have to reject this with all our strength and insist on what the Scots and English have not insisted on: a national identity that immigrants are obliged to adopt if they want to become part of our country. If we fail to do that, we’ll wake up and find ourselves in the position of Scotland, where the leader of a major political party feels free to push ethno-religious sectarianism while the liberal mainstream nods along, oblivious to their own impending destruction.
