The Turks Are Coming!

Three hundred years ago this cry of alarm was frequently heard in Europe. Now the Turks are coming again, but in various non-belligerent ways.

The Turks have peacefully invaded Europe and are to be found all over the map as “guest workers.” They are not much liked by ordinary people in many of these countries, mainly because unemployment is growing, but they are very much appreciated by employers as hard-working, reliable, simple, and abstemious, though unassimilable (their religion is too different to let them melt into local patterns, as other guest workers—Yugoslavs, Italians, Spaniards—do). In the big German cities—above all, West Berlin— there are now entire Turkish quarters, and the children of these immigrants crowd the schools. Given their high birth rate and their reluctance to go home, where living standards are a great deal lower, the Turks are becoming a problem demographically.

EK

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Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

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Three hundred years ago this cry of alarm was frequently heard in Europe. Now the Turks are coming again, but in various non-belligerent ways.

The Turks have peacefully invaded Europe and are to be found all over the map as “guest workers.” They are not much liked by ordinary people in many of these countries, mainly because unemployment is growing, but they are very much appreciated by employers as hard-working, reliable, simple, and abstemious, though unassimilable (their religion is too different to let them melt into local patterns, as other guest workers—Yugoslavs, Italians, Spaniards—do). In the big German cities—above all, West Berlin— there are now entire Turkish quarters, and the children of these immigrants crowd the schools. Given their high birth rate and their reluctance to go home, where living standards are a great deal lower, the Turks are becoming a problem demographically.