Everyday awareness of this problem as well as an awareness of it going largely unsaid means that many Europeans chew over another dark concern. Which is that seeing these very large numbers of people and seeing them going about their very different lives, it might be the case that in the future these people will come to dominate – that, for instance, a strong religious culture when placed into a weak and relativistic culture may keep itself to itself at first but finally make itself felt in more definite ways. Again, studies and polls are not much use in pinning down this sense of imminent change. Occasional polls are used to ‘prove’ that immigrant communities are integrated into existing society. But if the integration that politicians and some pollsters say has happened had in fact occurred, then we would be witnessing quite a different reality. For example, pubs very often close in those areas of the United Kingdom where Pakistani and other Muslim migrants have moved in in large numbers. If the newcomers were becoming ‘as British as anybody else’ – as government ministers and others insist that they are – then the pubs would remain open and the new arrivals drink lukewarm beer like everybody else who had lived on the street before them. It is the same with churches. If the incomers were indeed to become ‘as British as anybody else’, then they would fail to turn up to church most Sundays but would be there for weddings, occasionally christenings, and most likely just once a year for Christmas. But that is clearly not what has happened. The churches have closed like the pubs and these buildings have had to be put to other uses.

Although the pretence remains that the mosque-going, teetotal arrivals constitute a seamless transition of native traditions, from such visible aspects of identity it is obvious that the results will be very different. And the causes that lie behind such differences are the harder ones to deal with. The same story and the same silence can be applied to the Turkish and North African suburbs of Amsterdam, the suburbs of Brussels like Molenbeek, areas of Berlin such as Wedding and Neukölln, and any number of other cities across the continent. In each case the price that local people were made to pay, for taking anything but the most positive attitude towards the arrival into their towns and cities of hundreds of thousands of people from another culture, was just too high. Whole careers not only in politics, but in any walk of life, could be ruined by any recognition of the new facts, never mind any proposed alteration to them. And so the only thing left for people to do – whether locals, officials or politicians – was to ignore the problem and lie about it.