Within the space of four months, between October 2010 and February 2011, the heads of government of Germany, Britain and France each declared, in terms that would have been unsayable a decade earlier, that multiculturalism had failed.[1] The declarations were political, and politics forgets its confessions quickly; but they gave official voice to something ordinary citizens across Western Europe had been saying among themselves for a generation. The difficulty is that the word failed is too blunt to be useful, and its bluntness has invited an equally blunt reply: that Britain, France and Germany are full of people of foreign origin who are entirely at home, and that those who speak of failure are therefore either mistaken or malicious.

The 1981 Act already ended the old automatic jus soli. What follows is not a party programme. It is an account of what the statute still leaves open, of what has changed around it in the last three years, of how a restrictionist reading of St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans 13 and the Fathers tries to close those openings, and of why that reading is contested inside the tradition it claims. The argument is offered in the conviction that a Christian may hold a hard view of membership without pretending that Scripture dictates it, and may hold a generous one without pretending that the magistrate has no office.‍