To varying degrees in each country, the new arrivals were put into towns and suburbs on their own, generally in places where they would work. Even when the work dried up, people coming in from the same communities still tended to move to the areas where other people of their background lived. If they were not always encouraged to do so, certainly there was little effort to discourage them from doing so. Governments were subsequently blamed for the segregation, but many of the immigrants self-segregated through a perfectly understandable wish to retain their culture and customs in a society that had no connection to them.

When people realised that the newcomers were not going anywhere, there was also some native resistance to their presence, and any suggestion that the migrants should change their ways was inevitably tainted by association. If the immigrants were going to stay then they should be made to feel at home. To do so it was necessary to do a whole range of things. But it was easier to do the abstract things than the practical ones. Among the abstract things was a clear effort to adapt or change the story of the host nation. Sometimes this was simply a process of rewriting history or changing its emphases. On other occasions it seemed to involve an active denigration of it.

One such effort, as practised by President Wulff, involved talking up any and every aspect of non-European culture in order to raise it to a level at least of parity with Europe. So, for instance, the more Islamic terrorist attacks occurred the more the influence of the Islamic neo-Platonists was raised and the more the significance of Islamic science was stressed. In the decade after those attacks the rule of the Muslim Caliphate of Cordoba in Andalusia, southern Spain, between the eighth and eleventh centuries moved from historical obscurity to being the great exemplar of tolerance and multicultural coexistence. This itself required a careful new version of history, but the past was being conjured up to provide some hope in the present.