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The argument people like Keith Woods makes is that these Arab immigrants will never be German, no matter how long they are there or if they learn the language, whether they commit crime or do not commit crime, whatever they Tweet or whatever political policy they support, whatever religion they will follow, the only certainty is that they will never be German. So your rebuttal is not responsive to the issue they fundamentally have with the mass migration of non-European people to European civilization.
It's not just about crime, it's not just about religion, it's not just about terrorism, although those things can be relevant symptoms, it's about jealously guarding a European genetic and civilizational inheritance from being Africanized, replaced by Arabs or Chinese, Indians or whatever.
Your argument is most responsive to the Conservatives who just say "hey, I'm not racist I just oppose mass Arab migration because I don't want terrorist attacks in my Christmas villages." For those people you can do your well ackhually it wasn't Islamic extremism that inspired the attack, but that just doesn't work on the DR perspective.
Why stop at 100,000? Why not 100 million? Even if mass migration of Asians, Vietnamese, Chinese to Germany caused a reduction in crime and created economic growth do you think the DR should accept these foreigners because they commit less crime or raise GDP? Why not replace all of Europe with Chinese if it lowered crime and raised IQ? It's only conservatives who say it's about those things.
This terrorist attack is pertinent to the DR perspective because it provides a symbolic counterexample to the lie that, no matter who you are, you can go to Germany, learn the language and obey the law and, congratulations you're German! No you are not. The American Midwest family with Germanic ancestry they don't even know about is more German than they will ever be. So this man ostensibly being the "model" Arab immigrant but still become inspired to commit this act is shattering the liberal illusion of assimilation, or that being German is just an idea.
His motivation was European immigration policy. You try to be ultra-specific about it to brush it as a one-off, but it introduces the likelihood of violence in response to Right-wing Immigration reform in Europe. We may see more of that type of violence than radical Islamic-inspired violence, although a lot of it will be blended together.
We have seen a similar pattern with Free Speech in Europe: terrorist attacks in response to offensive speech did not motivate backlash against mass migration it motivated crackdowns on "hate speech" out of fear of offending Muslims. So if we see more Arab terrorists attack Europe because of European immigration reform we will likely see pressure put against immigration reform. This is relevant especially at a time when parties are flirting with the idea of remigration.
You don't think that AfD and other European parties beginning to support remigration is likely to inspire any more of this violence? We already see race riots and organized street violence by African and Arab gangs. That already happens, and it's political, it's not driven by radical Islam. So your denial that we won't see more of this sort of political violence is absurd.
Yes, the likelihood is near 100% that this sort of violence is going to influence European policy on immigration, most likely it will cause authorities to crackdown harder on political support for remigration because authorities will plausibly be able to say that supporting this policy is likely to foment violence. Certainly if that policy were to be pursued, then violence from deportees would be a top concern of that policy. So there's simply no reality in which the prospect of violence from these African and Arab migrants is irrelevant, Muslim or otherwise.
This attack is more relevant because it was motivated by European immigration policy than if it were just radical Islam. It's proof that mass migration irrevocably influences politics and "assimilation" is fundamentally a lie.
Obviously there are different tiers of the anti-immigration position that include various forms of nativism and not-nativism.
What is likely, though, is that most Western Europeans would probably have quietly acquiesced to mass immigration and demographic change without any major drama if the migrants had been, say, all Vietnamese or Filipino. Not because the nativist position would have been ‘disproven’, but because there would be none of these extreme staccato incidents of terrorist violence, things like Rotherham, Charlie Hebdo etc that draw a great deal of public attention.
In the US the majority of the public are still relatively torn on mass immigration, and the large scale deportation of most legal immigrants, let alone actually stripping naturalised migrants of citizenship, is an extreme fringe position. In Canada the public only really turned after they started importing pretty much the entirety of the Punjab at like 2% of the whole population per year.
There isn’t a huge (foreign) religion/race-neutral nativist constituency in most Western countries, meaning the population that wants everyone gone regardless of who they are, how they act and what they believe. Even in Iberia where there’s been huge legal immigration (often of people who are rather far from being of pure euro descent) from Latin America almost all anti-immigrant hostility is directed towards migrants from the Islamic world.
Counterpoint: there seems to be a massive backlash to migration in Canada from Indian immigrants, and that is not caused by crime or terrorism by Indian migrants.
What's happening is the European groups, too, take the political playbook from US Conservatives. "We're not racist (that would be evil!) we just think radical Islam is bad mmkaay." But that is downstream of the political pressures of liberal hegemony, there's a practical reason it centers on a religious critique of migration rather than a racial critique of migration.
Remigration strikes a more nativist cord than it does a purely anti-Islamic cord.
I think in the counterfactual where the majority of recent non-European migrants to Europe aren’t from the Islamic world is one in which anti immigration sentiment is far lower. As far as Canada goes, they did the equivalent of the US importing like 7m Indians a year several years in a row, which is very unusual even by Western mass immigration standards.
Before 2020, Canadians didn’t seem to care much about immigration, Trudeau won a landslide, and there had been mass immigration of Chinese and Indians for at least 25 years.
Depending on whether you think they are Europeans or not, you have a non-counterfactual point of comparison: Spain has had tons of immigration from Latin America, and while there has obviously been some backlash, it doesn't seem to be as strong as in the rest of Europe.
Latin Americans are already Spanish-speaking Catholics, so you'd expect them to be more culturally similar and willing to integrate when they're not.
They are also themselves largely Spanish, so immigrants with actual Spanish ancestry causing less trouble than purely non-European immigrants is proof of the DR perspective, not the other way around.
Just to add on to this- the Latin American immigrants who immigrated to Spain are mostly from elite or at least upper-middle class strata who may not be 100% pure European but are at least majority European.
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Counter counterpoint- they're Indian. Mexican and Ukrainian and Vietnamese immigrants would have gotten away with it.
Minor counter counter counterpoint
There is some minor hostility to Ukrainians in Poland. But it is far from widespread and that is after massive shock migration due to war.
Though if 4% of country would be imported from Syria/Libya/Turkey/Nigeria/Russia/China/etc within months then reaction would be much poorer then welcoming then minor hostility months/years later.
Canada is much more welcoming of outsiders than Poland, though.
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