Speaking to younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party about Germany’s 16 million foreign worker population, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said this past Saturday:

We kidded ourselves a while, we said: ‘They won’t stay, sometime they will be gone’, but this isn’t reality. And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other… has failed, utterly failed.

This analysis, while spot on, is unfortunately years late. Three years ago The Heritage Foundation’s Senior Policy Analyst for European Affairs Sally McNamara wrote:

Multi­culturalism has been a comprehensive failure. Instead of integrating different ethnic and cultural groups into society and garnering value from waves of immigration, Europe has moved far further toward separation than toward integration, with millions of disaffected and radicalized Muslims liv­ing in ethnic ghettos.

Multiculturalist policies appear to give special treatment to groups identified by religious affili­ation, which stirs resentment among the major­ity population. This has given birth to an emergent culture of isolated ethnic groups, par­ticularly Muslim, who are geographically clumped together and are increasingly unlikely to chal­lenge extremist ideologies. Ed Hussain, a re­formed former Islamic fundamentalist terrorist plotter, has said that “in the name of multicultur­alism we have these monocultural ghettos, this underworld where none of this [extremism] is ever questioned.

You can read McNamara’s whole speech, here.