So you acknowledge that a significant and growing percentage of muslims are not integrated into European societies, are bankrupting the host countries, are filling its prisons and your solution is to open the floodgates? That does not seem to be in intelligent. It would seem more logical to CLOSE permanently the floodgates and then take steps to integrate and westernize the Muslims that are already there. Think about it for a second. Your country is FAILING miserably in integrating a large and growing segment of the population. That segment is responsible for the most of the crime in your country and is a breeder for terrorism. Why would you divert more of your increasingly limited resources to growing this disaffected group instead of attempting to Westernize and integrate the existing population?
Sam Harris is right but he is losing the argument, even though all the evidence and data proves him correct. If you are a true rational empiricist, you would recognize the cogency of his arguments.
It's worth recognizing that Original Earl's analogy is rather apropos. Muslims in france are largely a legacy of its colonial past in africa. Unfortunately they never really had their AA or similar post-civil rights era policies for integration so the slums are pretty much what they are in all these countries. Like brazil where the favelas exhibit a distinct lack of white skin/features. The common explanation for this obvious discrepancy, particularly in the past, is that negros and such are genetically inferior.
So to understand your/Harris/etc's proposition more clearly/correctly, it's that we should stop importing people that we set up to fail. That's a fair enough point, but the problem isn't really with the immigrants.
To head off potential counterargument about other immigrant ethnicities at the pass, observe that there's various "china-towns" in many metros in the US. Well, it so happens that chinamen shared a social status with negros at eras in time, imported once for their manual labor and well known for their opium dens which supposedly seduce white womens and whatnot, leading to a virtual ban in immigration policy which you can google. I have it on pretty good authority that triads continue to operate through those historically impoverished areas, but you don't hear much about it for reasons what will become clear soon enough.
Despite this the new story of chinese here once immigration was allowed again is that of college students, and now their nouveau riche. So the interaction the gen pop have is with high (math) achievers in college, or at least rich ones. The funny because it's true comedy in this case is that even kids who aren't descendants of the new crop of immigrants are now expected to achieve in school.
So the question is, how did the "chinese" genome/culture change in those intervening years from born criminals quite literally barred from entry to the technorati?
10% of France's population is Muslim. 75% of its prison population is Muslim. That is an objective fact. I got tons of stats like this. Do you really want to get into the terrorist attacks stats in America where the Muslim population is less than 1% but accounts for over 50% of terrorist fatalities? You are an objective empiricist. Data should matter to you.
I recall France doesn't actually collect ethnic demographic data so those are always going to be estimates, though that number from you keeps going up so it's pretty clear how those estimates tend to work.
The stat itself is also misleading (in addition to somewhat skewed to start with) because prisoners often convert to islam after the fact to get in with the groups inside. This happens with some frequency in the US also, as you'll find many of these muslims are black and certainly didn't grow up in a muslim household.
The reason why muslims account for 50% or whatever of "terrorist" fatalities is because what poor people fighting is labelled. Dropping a laser guided missile on some hapless civilians isn't "terrorism" by definition because that's something we'd do.