The Chicken-and-Egg Fallacy

Parallel societies are not the problem conservatives think they are, and dispersal may make everything worse.

It is the classic chicken-and-egg question, except the usual conservative answer gets the order exactly backwards.

The standard script for most conservatives goes like this: mass immigration from incompatible regions has failed because of parallel societies. Those dense, self-contained enclaves, complete with their own languages, marriage markets, welfare patterns, and values prevent integration, breed crime and dependency, and turn host nations into fractured patchworks. Therefore, the fix to conservatives is obvious: break them up. Disperse the residents into majority-European towns and cities. Force mixing. Mandate “Danish values” classes or French republicanism or German Leitkultur until the ghettos dissolve and assimilation finally takes hold.

It sounds logical. It feels morally tidy for some. But data from three decades of European experiment says the causation runs the other way.

Parallel societies do not cause the failure of immigration policy. They are the visible manifestation of a stubborn reality. That reality is that large cohorts from North Africa, the Middle East, parts of South Asia, and Turkey simply do not want (or cant) assimilate into the host nation’s culture, economy, or identity.

They self-segregate because it preserves what matters to them, religious endogamy, arranged marriages, parallel social norms, stronger identification with origin-country than with the host country. The enclaves form downstream of that, not the other way around.

Earlier waves of European migrants (Italians, Greeks, Poles) largely melted in because they chose to (or because they are culturally and ethically similar enough to). Today’s cohorts largely do not. Europe’s own longitudinal studies on second and third-generation outcomes, employment gaps, welfare dependency, crime disparities, intermarriage rates that remain strikingly low, show the pattern persisting even after decades of policy pressure and generous integration spending.

So when conservatives demand the dispersal of these communities into majority-white suburbs and towns, they are not solving the problem. They are exporting it. They are creating the conditions for new ghettos to sprout everywhere, while simultaneously destroying the only practical advantage that parallel societies accidentally provide: geographic and social concentration.

Because if the honest, evidence-based assessment is that large-scale assimilation has already failed for these groups and every major European dataset points that way, then the realistic endgame is not more integration programs. It is eventual mass deportation or repatriation incentives on a scale never attempted in modern Western democracies. And in that scenario, parallel societies are not the enemy. They are the only thing keeping the option logistically and politically viable.

Concentrated enclaves are targetable, authorities know exactly where the high-density clusters are, specific neighbourhoods, mosques, community networks. Raids, processing centres, charter flights, and removals can be organised in batches with manageable disruption. Historical precedents for large-scale removals (the 1930s U.S. Mexican repatriation or post-war population transfers in Europe) moved fastest when populations were still clustered. Once people are scattered into every suburb and village, enforcement becomes a nightmare of door-to-door operations, endless individual court cases, higher evasion, skyrocketing costs, and mixed-status families creating new legal obstacles at every turn.

Europe has already run the dispersal experiment. Denmark’s much-vaunted “ghetto laws” since 2018 are the purest test case: forced relocation out of designated high-immigrant areas, demolition of social housing, mandatory integration classes for toddlers, doubled criminal penalties in target zones, all designed to shatter parallel societies and force mixing. On paper the official “ghetto” list shrank. In practice the underlying behavioural patterns, non-contribution, parallel norms, crime concentrations, simply re-formed elsewhere or persisted in diluted but still visible forms. Income for affected residents often dropped. Problems were exported, not erased, and the policy is now being challenged in EU courts as discriminatory anyway. The same story repeats in France’s banlieues, Sweden’s vulnerable areas, and Germany’s Turkish and MENA quarters: scatter the seed and mini-enclaves or the same refusal-to-integrate behaviours reappear in new towns. Geography does not override culture when the will to assimilate is absent (or not possible).

This is the realpolitik conservatives keep missing. Dispersal does not create assimilation, it creates nationwide diffusion, it turns a containable, visible problem into an embedded, nearly irreversible one, complete with citizen children, local voting power in every district, and a public that gradually loses the stomach for hard measures once the “other” is no longer visibly separate. Parallel societies, ugly as they are, function like a natural holding pen: the refusal to contribute stays identifiable and removable as a bloc when the political moment finally arrives (economic crisis, major terror wave, or fiscal breaking point).

The chicken-and-egg error, blaming the enclaves instead of the self-segregating behaviour that creates them, leads straight into a policy trap. It wastes another decade chasing an integration fantasy that the data does not support, while eliminating the only structural condition that would make the realistic fallback (mass removal) even remotely feasible. If the goal is ever to do what the numbers increasingly suggest must be done, then preserving the separateness is a strategic advantage.

Parallel societies are not a feature anyone should celebrate. But if the alternative is pretending that forced mixing will magically produce the assimilation that thirty years of evidence says will not happen, then they are, accidentally and ironically, the best friend the repatriation option has left.

https://celina101.substack.com/p/the-chicken-and-egg-fallacy