Italy has enacted a sweeping new education policy that bars students from covering their faces in class, limits foreign-born pupils to 30% of any single classroom, and threatens parents with fines up to $1,120 if they skip mandatory Italian-language courses. The measure, dubbed the “Schools Decree,” takes effect next summer and is the latest sign that European governments across the political spectrum are tightening the rules around immigrant integration.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni defended the policy on X, describing the rules as “tools of common sense that do not divide, but truly help to integrate, avoiding ghetto classes and giving all students the same opportunities.” She added that the goal is “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.”
For American observers who value limited government and individual liberty, the decree poses an uncomfortable question: can a free society mandate cultural assimilation without becoming illiberal itself — and is Europe’s experience a preview of a debate still to come in the United States?
A Continent-Wide Shift
Italy is far from alone. Denmark’s center-left government has imposed what critics call “ghetto laws.” France has restricted religious symbols in schools since 2004. Germany requires language and civic courses for newcomers. The Netherlands now tests immigrants before they even arrive on Dutch soil.
Swedish political scientist Daniel Schatz argues the old left-right divide no longer explains these policies. “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,” he said. “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 scientist Sara Wallace Goodman points to Denmark as a case of unusual consensus. Because Denmark’s generous welfare state is built around its citizens, she said, the government has found it politically necessary to make it “very difficult for outsiders to establish themselves and really to gain access to those similar entitlements.” That toughness, she noted, also helps Denmark’s center-left government blunt challenges from the right.
The Warning for America
Nile Gardiner, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, called mass migration and what he termed “Islamification” the single biggest issue facing Europe today — and warned it would not stay confined to the continent. “What you’re seeing in London and other European cities can easily happen in the US,” Gardiner said. “These cultural shifts will all come to America, unless American leaders are willing to fight back.”
Gardiner pointed to a recent video circulating on TikTok showing shoppers at an Asian market in London lining up in a queue largely separated by gender, calling it troubling. “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,” he said. “What we’re seeing is the imposition of the Islamic culture in Britain, which is the heart of Western civilization.”
Gardiner also described what he called a “red-green alliance” forming in several European cities. “France is in a state of anarchy and a lot of the violence is driven by Islamists in conjunction with the far-left,” he said. “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.”
Reasonable Rules or Surface-Level Fixes?
Not every expert views the new restrictions as extreme. Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, Senior Envoy to Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said learning the national language and participating in a child’s education are reasonable expectations of citizenship. “Requiring students to keep their faces visible in an environment built around communication and interpersonal contact is also entirely reasonable,” she said.
But Rodan-Benzaquen cautioned that such measures may only treat symptoms. “Governments often concentrate on the most visible manifestations of a problem while paying insufficient attention to what produces it,” she said. “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.”
She also warned that government cannot demand loyalty to institutions that fail the people they’re supposed to serve. Officials “cannot demand attachment to common institutions while those institutions fail children or block advancement, or Islamist propaganda that encourages people to reject those institutions,” she said. “Nor can public authorities negotiate away basic principles whenever an organized group challenges them.”
On France’s two-decade-old ban on conspicuous religious symbols — covering Muslim headscarves, Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses alike — Rodan-Benzaquen said the underlying principle is that children should develop their own judgment in a shared educational space. “The central promise” of the French model, she said, “remains worth defending… you can become fully French whatever your origins,” though she acknowledged “sustaining it is becoming more difficult.”
Parallel Societies
Goodman traced today’s anxieties back to a mid-2000s UK report by Trevor Phillips, then head of the Commission for Racial Equality under Prime Minister Tony Blair, who warned that Britain was “sleepwalking into segregation” as communities built “parallel societies” living separate lives. Integration policies, Goodman said, 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.”
Goodman argued that Europe has never fully reckoned with what sustained immigration means long-term. “Europe is in a really unique situation where it has accepted immigration, but it hasn’t accepted the long-term consequences of immigration,” she said. The continent that “birthed the Enlightenment and the ideas of liberalism and pluralism” now has to decide, in her words, that “there’s a boundary on this.”
Schatz added that the debate isn’t really about raw numbers. “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.”
He argued that any durable model will require both enforcement and openness. “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,” Schatz said.
