Tony Blair Faith Foundation: Homeland Insecurity: Migrants & Their Religion

The question is how do the countries that receive migrants behave towards them?  There is the social reaction put baldly “avoid a school with a lot of diversity”.   At a recent International Education Conference in the European Parliament, Pierre Mairesse, Director of life – long learning 2020 in the “Direction Generale de l’education et de la culture”, of the European Commission, described this reaction with great clarity. “It is simply wrong”.  “But strong policies need strong evidence”.
Thomas Huddleston of the Brussels Migration Policy Group reported on his organisation’s Migrant Integration Policy Index which seeks to provide the evidence.  It breaks down a number of indices such as labour mobility, family reunion into quantitative data for standards setting in European countries.  The “intercultural index” was particularly interesting for the Tony Blair Faith Foundation with its list of teacher training in intercultural education, number of migrants on teaching staff, adapting the daily life (of schools), modifying curricula, incluturation as part of curricula, state provision of inculturation and so on.   Sweden and Portugal and Canada came top of the league.  UK and Germany scored 60%. c.f. Latvia at the bottom with 31% (see http://www.mipex.eu/).
In another study, the “old” countries of migration, USA and Canada, scored high (though Arizona brought down the US score) compared with those experiencing it as a significant social process for the first time.  But what was striking in both studies was the absence of any specific mention of migrants’ expression of religious freedom featuring in the key indices. Nothing on religion at all except wrapped in the safe label of culture...
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