AMuslim who cleans a European railway station is useful. His daughter who seeks to run the railway becomes, in the language of exclusion, evidence that the country is being taken over. That contradiction lies at the heart of the “Muslim invasion” narrative: minorities are welcomed as labour but too often treated as intruders when they claim equal standing.
Immigration presents legitimate questions about housing, public services, borders and integration. Governments must address them. But describing Muslims collectively as invaders replaces policy with religious suspicion. It blurs distinctions between citizens and foreigners, workers and refugees, peaceful believers and violent extremists. A population becomes an accusation.
Conversations with other Muslim communities repeatedly brought me back to poverty, restricted opportunity and the enduring economic inequalities associated with colonial histories.
Donald Trump helped normalise this language long before returning to the presidency. On December 7, 2015, his campaign demanded a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” The proposed distinction was explicitly religious. A Muslim doctor and a Muslim child were placed within the same category of exclusion, regardless of their conduct.
At the United Nations on September 23, 2025, Trump warned European leaders: “Your countries are going to hell.” He linked migration and energy policies to Western Europe’s destruction. His broad attack on migration portrayed demographic change as civilisational collapse, providing fertile ground for those who define Muslim presence itself as a threat.
The pattern has continued. Le Monde reported on October 19, 2026, that Trump and Russian officials portrayed unrest in France as evidence of immigration-driven decline, although its reporting identified education and living-cost grievances among the protesters. This illustrates why claims about migrants must be checked against the actual causes of events, rather than accepted as political explanations.
European examples are equally revealing. Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland states in its programme that Islam does not belong to Germany and presents the growing Muslim population as a danger. The same programme acknowledges that many Muslims are law-abiding and integrated. Its position leaves a fundamental contradiction between accepting individual Muslims and declaring their faith alien to national life.
The historical irony is considerable. European empires carried their languages, institutions, religions and commercial systems across continents through conquest and unequal power. English, French, Spanish and Portuguese remain global languages partly because colonial rule reorganised administration, education and opportunity. Those histories should encourage humility when European politicians portray cultural change as an intolerable injury.
America’s colonial foundations included a substantial trade in convicted prisoners. Between 1718 and 1775, British courts banished approximately 50,000 convicts to the American colonies, including people convicted of theft and other offences. Britain used transportation to remove people its authorities considered undesirable, while colonial employers purchased their labour. Penal exile and commercial exploitation were joined in a system that helped build the colonies. Enslaved Africans were separately transported by force and subjected to hereditary racial slavery.
For Indigenous peoples, European colonisation and American expansion brought catastrophic population loss and dispossession. Demographic research summarised by J. David Hacker and Michael R. Haines places the population decline in the area of the contiguous United States between 1492 and 1900 at more than 85 percent under commonly used estimates. Epidemics, warfare, massacres, forced removal and the destruction of livelihoods contributed to this catastrophe.
The scale of land seizure is equally stark. A 2021 study published in Science found that Indigenous nations in the contiguous United States had lost 98.9 percent of their historical land base. These histories of forced labour, mass death and territorial dispossession should weigh heavily on political rhetoric that depicts families seeking work and safety as invaders.
Postwar migration was also shaped by European demand for workers. Former colonial powers and other European states sought labour to sustain their economies. Britain recruited from the Commonwealth. Under West Germany’s agreement with Turkey, approximately 870,000 Turkish workers arrived between 1961 and 1973; around 80 percent performed demanding physical work in construction and manufacturing. Approximately half a million returned to Turkey by 1973.
France recorded 211,775 permanent-worker arrivals from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia during 1971-1975 alone. These were substantial labour movements serving European economic needs. Employers and governments helped create movements later portrayed as entirely unwanted.
There is a profound moral difference between arriving to conquer a population and arriving to work within its laws. The presence of mosques, halal shops or Muslim elected representatives does not establish territorial conquest. Equally, European Muslims cannot all be described as recent arrivals. Some belong to longstanding communities; others were born in the countries whose belonging politicians now question.
My understanding of these communities comes from direct professional engagement. During four years in France as a public policy and media adviser to Pakistan’s ambassador, I maintained close contact with the Pakistani community. Professional assignments also took me to almost twenty countries, where I met Pakistanis living and working abroad. Over the past two years in the United States, I have continued those conversations with Pakistani and other Muslim communities.
Across the communities I encountered, the recurring picture was of people earning their living through demanding, modestly paid work. They served in restaurants, drove taxis, painted buildings, worked on construction sites, cleaned premises and laboured in agriculture. Their days revolved around employment, rent, family obligations and their children’s future. This was the world I knew through sustained contact, rather than the imagined army of religious expansion portrayed in hostile political speeches.
In those circles, high-level professionals were a very small minority. My own impression would place them at around one percent of the people I encountered. Some appeared socially distant from the wider immigrant community, finding greater acceptance and prestige through their employers and the majority population. Their language, communication skills and professional networks opened doors unavailable to many manual workers. That contrast shaped my understanding of the divisions within immigrant life.
The pattern I observed was not confined to Pakistanis. Conversations with other Muslim communities repeatedly brought me back to poverty, restricted opportunity and the enduring economic inequalities associated with colonial histories. People sought a place where their labour could sustain a household. In my experience, their overriding ambition was a decent living and a secure future, rather than a campaign to convert Europe or replace its laws.
The history of recruitment and the lives I encountered lead to a question that reaches beyond immigration: what happens when the children of those workers seek the education, influence and authority their parents rarely possessed? Part Two follows that transition, examining how fear and discrimination confront educational advancement, and whether Western constitutional promises can deliver equal belonging.
The writer is a former press secretary to the president; former press minister to the Embassy of Pakistan to France and former MD (SRBC).