The West is in a major-league mess when it comes to immigration.  Enlightened conservatives have known this for many years.  The ostriches are just coming to their awakening, or else heads remain firmly buried in the sands of political correctness.

The pro-immigration narrative in many quarters has gone as follows.  We need immigrants to grow our economy and do the jobs our own people won't do, but don't worry: nobody who wants to emigrate to our nation desires to change our legal system into an authoritarian structure.  This policy platform does not discriminate between educated and uneducated immigrants; in fact, it tends to prefer the latter, as they have negligible wage bargaining power and will do the supposed "jobs Westerners won't do."

Alternatively, we hear the argument that the uneducated immigrants are possible risks, so instead we will dominantly accept the educated immigrants who are enlightened and desire to live in a modern, liberal democracy based on the principles of Western civilization.

According to data released by the Pew Research Center, the second argument – i.e., a preference for the educated immigrants – just had its foundation ripped out from under it.

We start with some background.  The primary concern is sharia law, and the sources of the concern are the massive levels of Muslim immigration that have been taking place, and continue to accelerate, throughout the West.  Large numbers of immigrants are entering from Islamic states.

When Syrian refugees started to flood in, questions were raised about where the risks came from.  Young, single, uneducated men – it was said – were the only real demographic holding Islamist tendencies.  The rest, particularly educated individuals – it was claimed – posed a near nonexistent threat of seeking to impose sharia law on their adopted countries.

So naive that view was.

Based on Pew's data, while a higher level of education does lower the percentage of Muslims in major source immigration countries (e.g., Turkey, Indonesia, Nigeria) that think laws should be influenced by the Quran, a majority of educated Muslims in these nations still favor the imposition of Quran-based (aka sharia) law.

For example, in Turkey, only 45% of educated Muslims said "[l]aws in our country should not be influenced by the teachings of the Quran," meaning that the remaining 55% favor the imposition of sharia in at least some form.

In Nigeria, the percentage of educated Muslims who are not willing to reject the imposition of sharia is 52%.  In Indonesia, it is 77%, and in Lebanon it is 54%.  Over in Senegal, the number is 78%.

With such high percentages of educated Muslims apparently favoring sharia law in their home countries, it is exceedingly unlikely that the West would be taking in (i.e., selecting exclusively for) only the Muslims who oppose a Quranic legal system.  And if these individuals favor sharia law in their home countries, there is no reason why they wouldn't favor sharia law in their adopted nation.  In fact, the spread of sharia on the road toward the global caliphate may be exactly why they are emigrating.

There is no way around this problem other than immigration restrictions based on religion, much as presidential candidate Donald Trump and others have argued for.  Simply asking potential immigrants to assure authorities they will not agitate for or otherwise support the imposition of sharia law is insufficient.  We have no way of assessing whether or not the oath-taker is lying.

Critics of Trump's views noted that we also have no way of assessing a potential immigrant's actual religion.  If we have a policy against Islamic immigrants, then applicants could simply lie and claim another religious belief or no religion at all.  This is true, and we are then led to the natural conclusion that, for national security reasons, immigration from dominantly Muslim nations should be severely restricted or eliminated entirely.

For those already inside the West's boundaries, any and all forms of support for the imposition of sharia law should be considered as treason.  It has been a long time since treasonous activities – which supersede any rights to freedom of religion – were prosecuted, and in a number of countries, the interpretation of treason has been greatly weakened to the point of near irrelevance.  Perhaps it is time to dust off and firm up those laws.