The Sicilian Mafia: Immigration and the ‘Alternate Economy’

Opponents of immigration like to highlight the criminality of immigrants. Ben Shapiro, for instance, (in a sentence designed to deflect criticism) says that while not all illegal immigrants are criminals, ‘lots of criminals are in fact illegal immigrants’. The impression one gets from following people like Shapiro is that immigrants are committing disproportionately more crime than the native population; that delinquency is part and parcel of large scale immigration. Renaud Camus, the creator of the Great Replacement theory, even has a term for this sort of delinquency: nocence, which he defines as, ‘the contrary of in-nocence’. According to Camus, immigrants, and specifically Muslim immigrants, ‘constitute a surprisingly high proportion’ of ‘hyperviolent’ offenders ‘making life impossible or an unbearable ordeal to the indigenous people’.

Related to this is the notion that Muslim immigrants are unassimilable; that they refuse to submit to Western values. The funny thing about both these claims (that they are violent criminals and unassimilable) is that they were made against previous immigrant groups, who have by now fully assimilated and are currently pointing the finger at Muslim immigrants. As Hein de Haas writes in How Migration Really Works:

White majority groups have routinely portrayed newcomers and minorities…