In what it called a “Schools Decree,” the Italian government announced last month that no student may cover their face in class, no classroom may exceed 30% foreign-born pupils and parents who skip mandatory Italian lessons could face fines of up to $1,120.
The decree, which takes effect next summer, is framed as a push for “integration,” but it raises the question of whether a Western democracy can force assimilation, or is it already too late?
Nile Gardiner, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom said that it is “The single biggest issue of our time in Europe: Mass migration and Islamification.” And had an ominous warning, “What you’re seeing in London and other European cities can easily happen in the US… These cultural shifts will all come to America, unless American leaders are willing to fight back.”
Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni defended the decree on X, calling the new rules “Tools of common sense that do not divide, but truly help to integrate, avoiding ghetto classes and giving all students the same opportunities. This is the direction we want to continue to follow: a school that integrates without giving up on rules, that supports those who have more difficulties and that puts everyone in a position to start from the same point.”
Experts say the decree’s principles are not extreme. “Learning the national language and participating in your child’s education are reasonable expectations,” said Simone Rodan‑Benzaquen, Senior Envoy to Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
“Requiring students to keep their faces visible in an environment built around communication and interpersonal contact is also entirely reasonable.” The question, she told Fox News Digital, is whether such measures actually improve integration or simply target the most visible symptoms while ignoring the deeper forces that discourage participation in wider society.
Italy is not alone. Governments across Europe of every political stripe are tightening integration rules. They range from the “ghetto laws” of Denmark’s center-left government, to France restricting religious symbols in schools, to Germany requiring language and civic courses, to the Netherlands testing newcomers before they even arrive.
Swedish political scientist Daniel Schatz says, “The real divide is increasingly not between left and right, but between those who believe a state may set firm conditions for membership in a national community, and those who fear those conditions can become discriminatory or exclusionary. It is about whether integration is a voluntary offer or a civic obligation. That question cuts across traditional party lines.”
University of California Irvine political science professor Sara Wallace Goodman calls Denmark “an interesting case where you’ve seen broad consensus on the immigration issue.” She says that due to Denmark’s “very generous welfare state” that “applies to their citizens,” the government has been forced to make it “very difficult for outsiders to establish themselves and really to gain access to those similar entitlements.”
Goodman, who also works with the European University Institute’s Global Citizenship Observatory, says Denmark’s center-left government “can get traction by looking tough on immigration,” which can “really defang the competitors that will come at you from the right.”
Underneath these policies lies a shared fear: the emergence of “parallel societies” – neighborhoods, schools and social environments where newcomers live largely separate lives. Governments worry that linguistic isolation, concentrated poverty and strong communal pressures can create self‑contained worlds that operate alongside, rather than within, the national civic space.
Goodman points to a UK report in the mid-2000s from Trevor Phillips, then the head of the Commission for Racial Equality under Prime Minister Tony Blair, in which he wrote about “parallel societies” that “were living separate lives.” Phillips said the “avowedly multicultural” Britain was “sleepwalking into segregation.” Goodman says integration policies try to “break up these non-integrated communities by fiat, but the flip side is that such a blunt instrument… can be restrictive and oppressive and destabilizing.”
The parallel society Phillips warned about may already be taking hold. A video distributed on TikTok shows shoppers at an Asian market in London waiting in a line mostly separated by gender. Nile Gardiner called the video disturbing. “I think it’s an illustration of the advancing Islamification of the United Kingdom, which has been accelerated in the last decade, and I think it poses a threat to the future of the UK.
“What we’re seeing is the imposition of the Islamic culture in Britain, which is the heart of Western civilization,” Gardiner told Fox News Digital. He points directly at the “red-green alliance,” noting that “France is in a state of anarchy and a lot of the violence is driven by Islamists in conjunction with the far-left. We are seeing a growing alignment between the greens, the socialists and the Islamists. They’re increasingly working together. This is the case in multiple European cities, from Berlin to London to Vienna to The Hague.”
Schatz said that the politics of migration are driven less by numbers than by visibility. “A country can have falling asylum numbers and still experience an intensifying migration debate if voters believe integration has failed,” he said. “Essentially, the issue is not whether Europe should have immigration. It is whether Europe still has the confidence to expect newcomers to join the society they entered.”
But Rodan‑Benzaquen warned that coercive measures only reach the surface of the problem. She said governments “cannot demand attachment to common institutions while those institutions fail children or block advancement, or Islamist propaganda that encourages people to reject those institutions. Nor can public authorities negotiate away basic principles whenever an organized group challenges them.”
She added, “Governments often concentrate on the most visible manifestations of a problem while paying insufficient attention to what produces it… Where there are organized efforts to discourage participation in wider society, we need to examine the people, institutions and financing behind those efforts. Regulating clothing will not, by itself, address them.”
Since 2004, France has restricted conspicuous religious symbols in public schools, including Muslim headscarves, Jewish skullcaps and conspicuous Christian crosses. Rodan-Benzaquen says “the principle is that children should be able to develop their own judgment and freedom of conscience in a shared educational space,” and it is part of France’s assimilation model.
She said the “central promise” of the French model “remains worth defending… you can become fully French whatever your origins. Although,” she adds, “sustaining it is becoming more difficult.”
Rodan-Benzaquen continued, “There has to be something clearly understood to integrate into,” adding, “a language, a political community, a history and freedoms and responsibilities that people are expected to share. A society embarrassed to transmit these will struggle to ask newcomers to embrace them.”
Goodman said, “Europe is in a really unique situation where it has accepted immigration, but it hasn’t accepted the long-term consequences of immigration. Societies over time adapt and start to see themselves as immigrant receiving countries and as multicultural, and a lot of societies in Europe have resisted this transformation.” She said that the “society that birthed the Enlightenment and the ideas of liberalism and pluralism” must evaluate itself “and say there’s a boundary on this.”
Schatz said that any successful integration model in Europe “will not be one that is simply ‘tough’ or simply ‘welcoming.’… A state that cannot enforce its borders or its basic civic rules eventually loses the public confidence needed for a generous and sustainable integration policy.”