The Migrant

Migrant - A person who moves from one place to another in order to find work and better conditions.
Migration has gone on for thousands of years and is the backdrop to all European settlement as the people from the warmer south and from Africa migrated north. The Indian sub-continent was self contained even before this period as were  the Chinese,  a settled community going back into antiquity each having a definite, clearly defined civilised society long before the European. 

In Britain we were dressed in skins when the Romans arrived and the Romans gathered much of their knowledge from the Greeks who proceeded them. Even the area from which most of the migrant body comes from, Syria and the surrounding area, were dabbling in mathematics and astronomy whilst the dominant members  of the EU, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands as well as ourselves, hadn't got much further than learning to till the soil. 

I for one was a migrant. Wandering around looking for work, exploring the opportunities that life in another land offered. Occasionally one found a little resentment in not being of local stock but nothing to worry about.
Of course "I" was one, and "they" are many, but is the mind-set of the present day migrant any different from my own or those of you who chosen to 'up sticks' and set up home in another country. Is our motivation any different from the Syrian family or the Afghan who has been seized with the need to improve his lot.
Apart from the numbers, it is our fear of not being able to assimilate a culture which is under-pinned by a strict religious belief and which has a history of domination. 

People on their own are malleable and assimilate fairly easily but people who have a religious determination are the antithesis of assimilation, to them to assimilate is to lose some of their religious heritage and that is a step to which their whole reason for being, is so entwined it is impossible and only conversion of the "other" is an acceptable outcome.

So it's not the migrant but their 'baggage' which worries us. And we worry about their baggage because it is idolatrous, not in the sense of worshipping idols but in the sense of it being an "uncritical excessive devotion to something" which inevitably leads to the complete opposite of the belief that a society, as multi cultural as ours has become can only exist if we assimilate.