Multicultural Europe? Not so much.

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The EU has just come out with a report on European attitudes toward immigration. Bottom-line, and predictable, message: they don’t like it. Among the findings:

  • 60 percent in the former EU of 15 states and 42 percent in the 10 mainly east European states that joined the EU last year believed there were “limits to multicultural society.”
  • nearly 40 percent across the EU opposed granting legal immigrants full civil rights.
  • 50 percent expressed “resistance to immigrants.”
  • 58 percent saw a “collective ethnic threat” from immigration, meaning they answered yes to questions including whether immigrants threaten jobs and a country’s culture, add to crime problems and make a country a worse place to live.

None of this is very surprising, of course. Nor is it news that such views are on the upsurge. It just confirms the commonplace that Europe’s biggest challenge in the 21st century, bar none, will be the assimilation of immigrant populations, whether from Muslim countries or the ten new member states. And this isn’t merely, or even primarily, a moral issue. As a matter of brute economics, Europe needs immigrants. The native- born population of the Western European countries is aging at an alarming rate, and retiring workers, if they’re going to be replaced, will have to be replaced by immigrants. Unfortunately, what this poll, and others, show is that no politician is likely to be rewarded for the kind of clear-headed, far-sighted engagement this challenge is crying out for. Far easier to raise the drawbridge.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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