I’m not interested in debating the anti-Islam diatribe. If your lived experience is that “bearded men and veiled women” have destroyed the halcyon paradise of your childhood, then that’s fundamentally a nostalgia-based emotional argument.

But I’ll clarify that I wrote that Spain, Portugal and Greece specifically have become dynamic economies in the context of the EU. Spain has grown at a consistent 3% for a decade. Of course the far-right argues that it’s the wrong kind of growth because it’s fueled by immigration (backwards-looking political movements prefer zero growth and a shrinking population if it means less people of the color they don’t like).