NK: If these immigrants don't bring curiosity, openness, an appetite for freedom and personal development, then it is awfully difficult to help them. As Thilo Sarrazin has correctly pointed out, money won't help. It makes no sense just to dole out more money for housing and child support. These people will just have ever more children whom they will raise to be as benighted as themselves. They won't instil in them the desire to learn and flourish. They won't enable them to understand that, since they are born in Germany, they form a part of German society and have a duty, as citizens, to take an active part in this wider community. I don't even think they need to speak German perfectly. All I want is for them to consciously accept their role in German society. I want immigrant parents to take advantage not only of social benefits, but of all the life-enhancing possibilities for their offspring that this country provides. They should be interested in a better future for their children. If immigrant children don't go to school, if they don't learn, we will one day wake up to find a huge mass of uneducated people in this country. That would be a serious threat to our culture. The standard phrase of the Muslim Turks in this context is that they don't want to become like the Germans.

KH: Classical liberalism teaches us that liberty means the absence of arbitrary coercion, especially by a state endowed with the monopoly of power. In the context about which we are now talking, the state doesn't play much of a role. This is all about communities, about private coercion through communities that are extremely hierarchical and held together by a religious dogma. What room can be in there for individual liberty? Not much, you might well say.

NK: Yes, unfortunately, and that is exactly the point. And I pity the schools and the teachers. They are completely submerged by the challenges they face. Society expects everything from them. They are supposed to teach the pupils everything they don't get at home, including the basic values that they don't have. Imagine classes, at least 90 per cent Muslim, full of children who bring with them their Islamic identities, their lack of interest in education, their lack of striving, their rejection of freedom, democracy and the rule of law. How is a teacher supposed to be able to turn them all around and to protect the interests of the remaining 10 per cent? Our society must impose clear conditions. We should have the guts to say: "Now you are here, you've got all the possibilities, use them. If you don't use them, there will be automatic sanctions." There must be sanctions if a pupil doesn't show up at school on time, if the child comes to school without the money for lunch, if child support is spent on the brother's next car or the sister's marriage, if a father takes his daughter out of school because she has reached the age of 11 and puberty is now approaching or if the grandmother is ill and the child is ordered to stay home and look after her for weeks. Parents who behave like that should be forced to pay a fine. We already have the legal basis on which we could do that, but we don't. We don't enforce the law or oblige parents to fulfil their duties.

KH: Well, there is a dilemma there. Precisely when you value freedom as much as we do, you don't really like to call for the state to force other people to live in a certain way. A perfectly liberal society would endorse full parental autonomy, there wouldn't even be mandatory schooling. Everything you just mentioned is exceedingly intrusive.