Italy’s School Veil Ban Rekindles Europe’s Assimilation Debate as Expert Warns US Could Be Next

Italy’s government has unveiled what it calls a “Schools Decree,” introducing several tough integration measures. Beginning next summer, students will be prohibited from covering their faces in class, schools will be expected to limit foreign-born pupils to 30% of enrollment, and parents who fail to attend required Italian-language lessons could be fined as much as $1,120.

Officials present the decree as a way to strengthen integration. But the plan has reignited a broader debate: can a Western democracy require newcomers to assimilate, and have European countries waited too long to address social divisions?

Nile Gardiner, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, described mass migration and what he calls the “Islamification” of Europe as “the single biggest issue of our time.” He warned that cultural changes already visible in London and other European cities could eventually appear in the United States unless American leaders take a more forceful approach.

Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni defended the decree on X, calling the new rules “Tools of common sense that do not divide, but truly help to integrate, avoiding ghetto classes and giving all students the same opportunities. This is the direction we want to continue to follow: a school that integrates without giving up on rules, that supports those who have more difficulties and that puts everyone in a position to start from the same point.”

Experts say the basic expectations outlined in Italy’s plan are not inherently radical. “Learning the national language and taking part in your child’s education are reasonable expectations,” said Simone Rodan‑Benzaquen, senior envoy to Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

She also said requiring students to keep their faces visible in classrooms—spaces centered on communication and personal interaction—is a reasonable policy. The larger issue, she told News Media, is whether these rules genuinely promote integration or merely address the most noticeable signs of a deeper problem while leaving the forces that discourage broader participation untouched.

Italy is part of a wider European shift. Governments on both the left and right are imposing stricter integration requirements, from Denmark’s so-called “ghetto laws” and France’s limits on religious symbols in schools to Germany’s language and citizenship courses and the Netherlands’ efforts to assess newcomers before they enter the country.

Swedish political scientist Daniel Schatz said the central political divide is increasingly separate from the traditional left-right spectrum. It now pits those who believe governments can establish firm requirements for membership in a national community against those who worry such conditions may become discriminatory or exclusionary. The debate, he said, is over whether integration should be offered voluntarily or treated as a civic duty.

Sara Wallace Goodman, a political science professor at the University of California, Irvine, points to Denmark as a notable example of broad political agreement on immigration. Because the country operates a generous welfare system designed primarily for its citizens, she said, policymakers have made it harder for outsiders to establish themselves and gain access to the same benefits.

Goodman, who is also affiliated with the European University Institute’s Global Citizenship Observatory, said Denmark’s center-left government can gain political ground by taking a firm stance on immigration. That approach can weaken right-wing challengers by addressing concerns they might otherwise use to attract voters.

At the heart of these policies is anxiety about the growth of “parallel societies”—communities, schools and neighborhoods where newcomers remain largely separated from the wider population. Officials fear that language barriers, concentrated poverty and intense internal pressures can produce self-contained social worlds operating beside, rather than inside, the country’s civic life.

Goodman cited a mid-2000s British report by Trevor Phillips, then head of the Commission for Racial Equality under Prime Minister Tony Blair. Phillips warned that separate communities were living distinct lives and argued that an openly multicultural Britain was drifting toward segregation. Goodman said governments have attempted to dismantle such disconnected communities through mandatory policies, but cautioned that blunt measures can also become restrictive, oppressive and destabilizing.

The parallel society Phillips warned about may already be taking hold. A video distributed on TikTok shows shoppers at an Asian market in London waiting in a line mostly separated by gender. Nile Gardiner called the video disturbing. “I think it’s an illustration of the advancing Islamification of the United Kingdom, which has been accelerated in the last decade, and I think it poses a threat to the future of the U.K.

Gardiner argued that Islamic cultural influence is increasingly shaping Britain, which he described as the center of Western civilization. He pointed to what he calls a “red-green alliance” involving Islamists, socialists and environmental activists, claiming that the cooperation has contributed to unrest in cities including Berlin, London, Vienna and The Hague. He also said France’s violence is being driven in part by Islamists working alongside the far left.

Schatz said migration politics are shaped less by raw population figures than by what voters can see in their daily lives. Even when asylum applications decline, he explained, public concern can intensify if people believe integration is failing. The fundamental question, he said, is not whether Europe should permit immigration, but whether it still expects newcomers to become part of the societies they enter.

Rodan‑Benzaquen, however, cautioned that coercion can address only the outward signs of a much larger challenge. Governments cannot expect citizens to feel connected to shared institutions when those institutions fail children or limit opportunities, she said. At the same time, she argued, authorities should not abandon core principles whenever organized groups challenge them or when Islamist propaganda urges people to reject public institutions.

She added that policymakers often focus on the most visible elements of a problem while overlooking the conditions that create it. When organized campaigns discourage participation in mainstream society, officials should investigate the people, institutions and funding involved. Rules governing clothing, she said, cannot solve those underlying issues on their own.

France has restricted prominent religious symbols in public schools since 2004, including Muslim headscarves, Jewish skullcaps and visibly displayed Christian crosses. Rodan‑Benzaquen said the policy reflects France’s assimilationist philosophy: children should have the opportunity to form their own views and exercise freedom of conscience within a common educational environment.

She said the “central promise” of the French model “remains worth defending… you can become fully French whatever your origins. Although,” she adds, “sustaining it is becoming more difficult.”

Rodan-Benzaquen continued, “There has to be something clearly understood to integrate into,” adding, “a language, a political community, a history and freedoms and responsibilities that people are expected to share. A society embarrassed to transmit these will struggle to ask newcomers to embrace them.”

Goodman said, “Europe is in a really unique situation where it has accepted immigration, but it hasn’t accepted the long-term consequences of immigration. Societies over time adapt and start to see themselves as immigrant receiving countries and as multicultural, and a lot of societies in Europe have resisted this transformation.” She said that the “society that birthed the Enlightenment and the ideas of liberalism and pluralism” must evaluate itself “and say there’s a boundary on this.”

Schatz said that any successful integration model in Europe “will not be one that is simply ‘tough’ or simply ‘welcoming.’… A state that cannot enforce its borders or its basic civic rules eventually loses the public confidence needed for a generous and sustainable integration policy.”