I can’t recall where I read this, so I haven’t any citation.  But it is an interesting train of thought.

An immigrant is someone who comes to a new country and adopts it’s laws and culture.  This doesn’t mean immigrants give up their culture or attitudes entirely.  It just means they conform to the general population and to the specific laws of their new home.

Settlers are entirely different.  They keep the laws and culture of their original homeland and do not conform to the laws and culture of their new home.  The reject the old adage “When in Rome do as the Romans do.”

Europeans settled North America.  They were not immigrants.  They brought their own laws and culture and eventually displaced the native inhabitants.  Often by force. 

So the question is are Muslims who move to a new country immigrants or settlers?  It’s hard to tell sometimes.  The majority appear to be immigrants.  Many become citizens in good standing in their new homeland, including the United States.

But many do not appear to want to conform to the mores and laws of their new countries.  They bring with them intact the laws of their religion and reject secular laws that are adhered to by the majority of citizens in their adopted country.  These folks are not immigrants.  They are settlers.

There’s something of a Diaspora going on with Muslims in recent years.  Millions of them have fled from the oppression and strife in their homelands.  Most have fled to nearby European countries where the question of whether these new arrivals are immigrants or settlers is far more than merely an intellectual question.

Entire Muslim communities in France, Spain, England and elsewhere live under their religious laws, not the secular laws of their host countries.  They reject their host’s laws.  In fact some have successfully demanded that they be allowed to live under their own laws.

One wonders what the reaction will be in the United States if Muslim immigrants reveal themselves to be, in truth, settlers?