But it wasn’t just Bush, the whole country decided to treat being a Muslim Arab immigrant like being black—a member of America’s protected, untouchable Civil Rights-eligible class. The Left sprang into action to form, in effect, a “Society For The Protection Of Enemy Aliens” and on the 20th Anniversary of 9/11 Bush was still talking about the threat of “nativism” and “religious bigotry”, rather than the threat of Islamic terrorism.
And an obvious step, after 9/11, would have been to curtail Muslim immigration—stop giving immigrant visa to at least those countries that the State Department lists as “State Sponsors Of Terror”.
Nothing like that happened. In 2017, John Derbyshire wrote
I’ve expressed before, more than once, my belief that the most astonishing, most incredible statistic of our age is that the U.S.A. admitted more Muslims for settlement in the fifteen years after 9/11 than it did in the fifteen years before.
With natural increase and chain migration, Muslims will be more than two percent of our population by 2050 — ten million people.
Nobody has voted for this, and no-one but a microscopic proportion of Americans welcome it, especially after 9/11, but it’s happening anyway. Not only did 9/11 fail to slow the increase, it speeded it up.
This is deeply strange and contrary to sense or reason. If you find yourself thinking about it while watching one of those 9/11 commemoration ceremonies, the ceremony suddenly loses a lot of its force. With no disrespect to the dead or their loved ones, the commemoration comes to look futile, self-indulgent. You fidget and change the TV channel.
The Pew Research Center, below, wrote in 2018 that
Muslim immigrants in the United States, roughly half of whom (56%) have arrived since the year 2000, come from a wide array of countries, and no single region or country of origin accounts for a majority of them. In total, immigrant respondents in Pew Research Center’s 2017 survey of U.S. Muslims named 75 different countries of origin. And this is reflected in their racial and ethnic diversity: No single racial or ethnic group accounts for a majority among Muslim immigrants, with 45% identifying as white and a similar share (41%) identifying as Asian.