From Reuters:
A German court sentenced a man of Turkish origin to more than nine years in prison on Thursday for the so-called “honor killing” of his sister but found two other brothers not guilty of conspiring in the murder. The murder of 23-year-old Hatun Surucu, who was shot while standing at a bus stop in a Berlin suburb last year, shocked Germany and sparked intense debate about a conservative Muslim immigrant community at odds with mainstream society. Forced to marry a cousin in Turkey as a young girl, Hatun Surucu later broke with her Turkish-Kurdish family in Berlin and was living independently with her five-year-old son, to the intense disapproval of her relatives, prosecutors said…. Public outrage at the murder was exacerbated when boys at a nearby school with many pupils from immigrant families were reported to have openly applauded the killing shortly afterwards because the victim had lived “like a German.” …The case is one of a series of incidents that have added to concerns that Germany’s large immigrant community, many out of work, poorly educated and not holding German citizenship, may be drifting further away from the rest of the country….
George Will, in a recent Washington Post column, warned that the U.S. should avoid the mistakes many European nations have made in permanently marginalizing an immigrant underclass. He wrote:
Conservatives should favor reducing illegality by putting illegal immigrants on a path out of society’s crevices and into citizenship by paying fines and back taxes and learning English. Faux conservatives absurdly call this price tag on legal status “amnesty.” Actually, it would prevent the emergence of a sullen, simmering subculture of the permanently marginalized, akin to the Arab ghettos in France.
