Italy School Veil Ban Highlights Europe’s Assimilation Debate, Expert Warns US May Follow

Italy’s government has unveiled what it calls a “Schools Decree,” barring students from covering their faces in classrooms, limiting the share of foreign-born pupils in any classroom to 30%, and allowing fines of up to $1,120 for parents who fail to attend required Italian-language lessons.

The measures are scheduled to take effect next summer and are being presented as a strategy to strengthen integration. But they have also revived a broader debate: can a Western democracy require newcomers to adopt the customs and language of the majority, or do such efforts risk crossing into forced assimilation?

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

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni defended the decree in a post on X, describing the rules as “common-sense tools” intended to promote integration rather than division. She said the policy would help prevent segregated classrooms, expand opportunity for all students and provide additional support to children facing greater difficulties. “A school that integrates without abandoning rules” is the direction her government intends to pursue, she wrote.

Some experts argue that the decree’s basic expectations are neither unusual nor extreme. Simone Rodan‑Benzaquen, senior envoy to Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said learning the national language and taking part in a child’s education are reasonable responsibilities for parents.

She also said requiring students to keep their faces visible in classrooms—settings built on communication and personal interaction—is a defensible rule. The larger question, she told News Outlet, is whether these policies genuinely improve integration or merely address its most visible signs while leaving deeper barriers to participation untouched.

Italy’s approach reflects a wider European shift. Governments across the political spectrum have introduced tougher integration requirements, including Denmark’s controversial “ghetto laws,” France’s limits on religious symbols in schools, Germany’s language and civic education requirements, and Dutch programs that assess newcomers before they enter the country.

Swedish political scientist Daniel Schatz said the central division is increasingly less about left versus right than about the role of the state in defining membership in a national community. The debate, he explained, asks whether integration should be offered voluntarily or treated as a civic duty—and whether firm expectations ultimately promote inclusion or become discriminatory and exclusionary.

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 Denmark maintains an expansive welfare system designed primarily for its citizens, she said, policymakers have made it difficult for newcomers to establish themselves and gain access to comparable benefits.

Goodman, who is also affiliated with the European University Institute’s Global Citizenship Observatory, said Denmark’s center-left government can benefit politically from taking a tough stance on immigration. Such policies, she argued, can reduce the appeal of right-wing parties seeking to make migration their defining issue.

At the heart of these policies is concern over the growth of “parallel societies”—communities, schools and neighborhoods where newcomers live largely apart from the wider population. Officials worry that language barriers, concentrated poverty and internal social pressures can produce self-contained environments operating alongside the national civic mainstream rather than as part of it.

Goodman cited a report published in Britain during the mid-2000s by Trevor Phillips, then head of the Commission for Racial Equality under Prime Minister Tony Blair. Phillips warned that communities were “living separate lives” and said Britain’s openly multicultural model was “sleepwalking into segregation.” Goodman said governments have tried to dismantle these isolated communities through policy, but cautioned that overly blunt measures can become restrictive, oppressive and destabilizing.

A TikTok video showing shoppers at a London Asian market standing in what appeared to be a mostly gender-separated line has been cited as an example of the concerns surrounding parallel communities. Gardiner described the footage as troubling and said he viewed it as evidence of what he characterizes as the growing influence of Islamic culture in Britain.

Gardiner told News Outlet that he believes Islamic cultural influence is increasingly challenging Britain’s traditional national identity. He also pointed to what he called a “red-green alliance” among Islamists, socialists and environmental activists, arguing that similar political alignments can be seen in cities including Berlin, London, Vienna and The Hague. He further linked Islamist groups and parts of the far left to unrest in France, claims that remain politically contested.

Schatz said public arguments over migration are shaped less by raw arrival figures than by how visible integration problems appear to voters. Even when asylum applications decline, he noted, the political debate can intensify if people believe newcomers are not becoming part of the broader society. The underlying issue, he said, is whether European governments still feel confident asking immigrants to participate fully in the communities they have joined.

Rodan‑Benzaquen cautioned, however, that coercive rules can address only the surface of a much deeper challenge. Governments cannot demand loyalty to shared institutions, she said, if those institutions fail children, restrict social mobility or leave people vulnerable to Islamist propaganda that urges them to reject the system. At the same time, she argued, authorities should not abandon fundamental democratic principles whenever organized groups apply pressure.

She added, “Governments often concentrate on the most visible manifestations of a problem while paying insufficient attention to what produces it… Where there are organized efforts to discourage participation in wider society, we need to examine the people, institutions and financing behind those efforts. Regulating clothing will not, by itself, address them.”

Since 2004, 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.”