In what it called a "Schools Decree," the Italian government announced last month that no student may cover their face in class, no classroom may exceed 30% foreign-born pupils and parents who skip mandatory Italian lessons could face fines of up to $1,120.

The decree, which takes effect next summer, is framed as a push for "integration," but it raises the question of whether a Western democracy can force assimilation, or is it already too late?

Nile Gardiner, director of The Heritage Foundation's Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom said that it is "The single biggest issue of our time in Europe: Mass migration and Islamification." And had an ominous warning, "What you’re seeing in London and other European cities can easily happen in the U.S… These cultural shifts will all come to America, unless American leaders are willing to fight back."

Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni defended the tightening integration rules. They range from the "ghetto laws" of Denmark’s center-left government, to France restricting religious symbols in schools, to Germany requiring language and civic courses, to the Netherlands testing newcomers before they even arrive.

Swedish Political scientist Daniel Schatz says, "The real divide is increasingly not between left and right, but between those who believe a state may set firm conditions for membership in a national community, and those who fear those conditions can become discriminatory or exclusionary. It is about whether integration is a voluntary offer or a civic obligation. That question cuts across traditional party lines."

University of California Irvine political science professor Sara Wallace Goodman calls Denmark "an interesting case where you've seen broad consensus on the immigration issue." She says that due to Denmark’s "very generous welfare state" that "applies to their citizens," the government has been forced to make it "very difficult for outsiders to establish themselves and really to gain access to those similar entitlements."

Goodman, who also works with the European University Institute’s Global Citizenship Observatory, says Denmark’s center-left government "can get traction by looking tough on immigration," which can "really defang the competitors that will come at you from the right."

Underneath these policies lies a shared fear: the emergence of "parallel societies" - neighborhoods, schools and social environments where newcomers live largely separate lives. Governments worry that linguistic isolation, concentrated poverty and strong communal pressures can create self‑contained worlds that operate alongside, rather than within, the national civic space.

Goodman points to a U.K. report in the mid-2000s from Trevor Phillips, then the head of the Commission for Racial Equality under Prime Minister Tony Blair, in which he wrote about "parallel societies" that "were living separate lives." Phillips said the "avowedly multicultural" Britain was "sleepwalking into segregation." Goodman says integration policies try to "break up these non-integrated communities by fiat, but the flip side is that such a blunt instrument… can be restrictive and oppressive and destabilizing."

The parallel society Phillips warned about may already be taking hold. A video distributed on France has restricted conspicuous religious symbols in public schools, including Muslim headscarves, Jewish skullcaps and conspicuous Christian crosses. Rodan-Benzaquen says "the principle is that children should be able to develop their own judgment and freedom of conscience in a shared educational space," and it is part of France’s assimilation model.

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."