Currently, as is well known, Europe is going through a time of relative demographic instability, for several reasons. fees These include violence and insecurity in parts of Africa and the Middle East, which are forcing a significant displacement of people seeking refuge; low birth rates in Europe, generating considerable demand for immigrant labor; and the historical links between European countries such as France and Britain and the peoples they had previously colonized and ruled. If we add to these factors the fact that many of the newly arrived groups in Europe have a higher birth rate than more established Europeans, we can anticipate that European nations, or at least some among them, will experience a fairly dramatic demographic shift within a few generations.

The mere fact of a change of population, or even of a movement between nations, does not necessarily pose a special problem. The problem occurs when those arriving in a country do not share the cultural, linguistic and moral instructions of their hosts, or share some of them and some of them do not. The great challenge of the arrival of immigrants and refugees from a culture quite different from that of their hosts is that from entrance, there is neither knowledge nor established trust between the two groups. For all practical purposes, they are like strangers who bump into each other on the road. They don't quite know where they come from, they don't quite know each other's lifestyles, values, priorities, experiences, and aspirations. Often, they don't even know each other's language .

Faced with ignorance of the other, we easily give in to fear and mistrust and become defensive. The stranger thus becomes a threat, and can even be perceived as an enemy: one who threatens "our" jobs, who threatens "our" way of life, who does not respect "our" customs and values, etc. This reaction, which has been reinforced by far-right European parties, reflects an understandable fear of the unknown, and a very human attachment to the values, customs, and well-being of "our" community or people.

European leaders have failed to interpret and respond convincingly to this negative reaction and have thus created a political opportunity for parties that aggressively oppose, supposedly on behalf of the people, the Admissions Office of migrants and refugees.

But xenophobic and aggressively anti-immigration policies, instead of generating a greater sense of solidarity and social cohesion, generate strong divisions within the people, between the supposed "native" and the "other," the one who supposedly does not belong to "our" society. And this division, if cultivated in the long run deadline, can give rise to very harmful social divisions and resentments, which would sooner or later express themselves in serious social tensions, and eventually even in criminality and violence, as it occurs with some frequency in the outskirts of Paris.

To overcome these destructive divisions, a sensible immigration policy should include three key aspects: first, instead of dividing people into "natives" and "outsiders," it would be desirable to develop a clear vision of the essential conditions that we can reasonably demand of those who seek to integrate into Europe's communities and to communicate this vision effectively to the refugee and immigrant. This would enable us to distinguish more credibly between the bona fide refugee or immigrant, and the criminal or wrongdoer who refuses to obey the rules of the game, who takes advantage of hospitality rather than appreciating it.

Second, a legal and economic infrastructure could be developed that would allow (unlike the current one) newcomers to play a constructive role in the Economics and in society instead of turning them into a chronic patient of the welfare state. If we are not prepared to give the foreigner the opportunity to play a constructive role in our communities, we make him a dependent of the state, and he makes do as he can, leading sooner or later to a sense of humiliation and exclusion from the dominant community.

Third, we should offer the immigrant and refugee affordable learning and cultural integration programs that allow them to learn the language, customs, and values that unite our communities and facilitate social service. But these programs should be based on a model of reciprocal integration, not on a model of pure "assimilation" into the dominant culture. It is not fair to ask a person to be asked to globally withdrawal his or her own culture. The most appropriate model is rather a model of mutual integration in which the host community, while having a certain primacy (if I am in your house I respect the "house rules"), also strives to empathize with the status, the culture, and the customs of its guests. In this model, there is mutual learning, and through this learning, the host and the guest get to know each other and gain mutual trust.

For this process of mutual learning to get off the ground and be sustainable, organizations, possibly coordinated by the state, are needed dedicated to the linguistic and cultural training of newcomers, as well as the cultivation of social relationships between newcomers and their host communities. Only with such programs, backed by legal and social access to realistic opportunities to play a positive role in social and economic life, can we hope to turn this demographic crisis into a tremendous opportunity for mutual enrichment between host and guest cultures.