Writing in the Sunday SF Chron Insight section, urbanist and demographer Joel Kotkin says liberal-leaning cities vulnerable to terrorism need to re-think the whole multi-cultural paradigm because their security is at stake.

The great challenge facing the world's major cities today is finding a way to make life safe for their citizens....history has shown repeatedly that once a city can no longer protect its inhabitants, they inevitably flee and the city slides into decline and even extinction.

While modern cities are a long way from becoming extinct, it's only by acknowledging the primacy of security -- and addressing it in the most aggressive manner -- that they will be able to survive and thrive in this new century...

...most older American cities have lost more people than they have gained since 2000. Families, retirees and immigrants, the key sources of population growth, are largely deserting the urban core....The U.S. cities that have declined most precipitously and consistently are those plagued by the nation's highest crime rates....Now, cities face a different menace. Sadly, many metropolitan leaders seem unprepared to meet today's terrorist threat head-on, in part due to the trendy multiculturalism that now characterizes so many Western cities. Consider London's multiculturalist Mayor Ken Livingstone, who last year welcomed a radical jihadist, Egyptian cleric Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, to his city.

Multiculturalism and overly permissive immigration policies have also played a role. Unfettered in their own enclave, Muslim extremists in Brooklyn helped organize the first attack on the World Trade Center in the early 1990s. Lax Canadian policies have allowed radical Islamists to find homes in Montreal and Toronto, where some might have planned attacks on the United States, like the 2000 plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport.

In Europe, multiculturalism has been elevated to a kind of social dogma, exacerbating the separation between Muslim immigrants and the host society. Not surprisingly, jihadist agitation has flourished in Hamburg, Amsterdam, Madrid, Berlin and Paris as well as London.

If cities are to survive, they will need to face this latest threat to urban survival with something more than liberal platitudes, displays of pluck and determination. They will have to face up to the need for sometimes harsh measures, such as tighter immigration laws, preventive detention and widespread surveillance of suspected terrorists.

They will also need to institute measures that encourage immigrants to assimilate, such as fostering greater economic opportunity for newcomers or enforcing immersion in the national language and political institutions. Militant anti-Western Islamist agitation -- actively supportive of al Qaeda, for example -- also must be rooted out; it can be no more tolerated in Western cities today than overt support for Nazism should have been during World War II.

Technological measures -- from cameras in subway tunnels to radiation- scanning devices at highway approaches to cities -- can also help improve security, as can steps like putting more police and bomb-sniffing dogs on mass transit, as New York has decided to do.

The kinds of policies needed to secure their safety may pose a serious dilemma for great cities that have been built on the values of openness, freedom of movement, privacy, tolerance and due process. Yet to survive, these same cities may now need to shift their primary focus to protecting their people, their commerce and their future against those who seek to undermine and even, ultimately, destroy them.

At the Washington State Ferries dock last weekend in West Seattle with my family, waiting for a car ferry across Puget Sound, I saw a Washington State Patrol officer and a bomb-sniffing dog checking out nearly all of the vehicles in line to board the boat going to vashon Island, and then on to Southworth on the Kitsap Peninsula. They are only required to do random searches, however, which is a concession to numerical realities (especially at the busier docks, such as in downtown Seattle and Bainbridge Island).

And indeed, the randomness of it all was underscored at the West Seattle (Fauntleroy) dock, when the K-9 unit stood down as vehicles began boarding the boat and a late arrival zoomed into line and drove on board without being checked. Perfect modus operandi for a jihadist, I thought. A ferries spokesperson later told me there is a policy that allows officers to deny boarding to last-minute arrivals after the K-9 unit stands down, and that is often done - but that policy is not mandatory.

It should be mandatory. Yet even so - as Kotkin emphasizes - in the end we must attack the cultural roots of jihadist terrorism in the West at least as strenuously as we conduct surveillance and strengthen security.

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Thomas Rekdal: There is much good sense in this post, but also much confusion. We need to separate the question of how best to incorporate Muslim immigrants into the body politics of liberal democracies from the question of how to deal with the security problems presented by Muslim terrorists already within our midst. They are different questions requiring different measures.

To oversimplify a great deal, the principal answer to the first question is not affirmative action or special solicitude for ethnic minorities, but a heavy dose of the sort of classical liberalism that was practiced in this country at the turn of the twentieth century, while the principal answer to the second is the kind of re-thinking of the grounds for liberal tolerance that is now evidenced in Prime Minister Blair's latest comments.

Richard Posner makes a powerful argument in a recent contribution to The Becker-Posner Blog that America has been more successful in integrating its Muslim minorities than Western Europe because of the differences in our labor laws and welfare policies. Economic failure, quite simply, has more adverse consequences here, while the opportunities to avoid it are also greater. Exactly so, and we need even more of these root-hog-or-die social policies. If Europeans wish to limit job growth while subsidizing the people who mean to blow them up, that is their choice; we should not follow suit.

At the same time, we could take a few lessons from the French, and now the Brits, on the proper limits of liberal tolerance for those who have no intention of reciprocating. In 1969, the Supreme Court threw the mantle of First Amendment protection over every form of speech short of a direct incitement to violence in circumstances where it is likely to be acted upon immediately. That was a silly, but harmless ideological excess at the time. It now threatens to be suicidal, as our European friends are already discovering.

David Jackson: Kotkin is conflating a lot of arguments to sell op-eds in this case.

The major cities that lost population so far this decade, aside from the usual Rust Belt suspects, also happen to be many of the cities with major tech concentrations: Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, etc (see Recession, tech). To attribute these declines to security concerns (declines that probably were gaining momentum prior to 9/11; how was YOUR pets.com stock doing in August 2001?), or to liken these population declines to the massive declines of earlier decades, is just wrong. Moreover to somehow link crime concerns to modern terrorist concerns is risible at best. Certainly crime was a part of the decamp from major Rust Belt towns in the 60s and 70s, but still, Mr. Kotkin, can you say race; and economic restructuring?

Your previous commenter is right in that we do a better job of assimilating people than most of Western Europe and mainly for economic reasons. There is very little dole here for newcomers, comparatively. Moving forward we should care substantially more about how immigrants join our society and implement better security procedures, especially for high value targets such as train stations, airports and, yes, ferry terminals. But Kotkin’s claxons just ring the bells to call attention to himself.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at August 7, 2005 11:19 AM