The polls are the admissions test
A state that wants religious law does not get to export the electorate.
The pause is not a guess about every person in a passport queue. It is a rule about the polity. If a majority of adults in the sending state say they want religious law to govern, the receiving state is entitled to stop issuing the visa. Private dissenters inside that state are not a reason to import the majority’s law.
Use the Pew questions without mixing them. In 2013, asked whether sharia should be the official law, 99 percent in Afghanistan and 84 percent in Pakistan said yes. On January 28, 2025, Pew reported that adults in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Malaysia more often say the Quran should outweigh the will of the people when the two conflict, including 77 percent in Bangladesh. Different years. Different sentences. Same direction: scripture over the electorate.
Sweden is the control group for a stupid version of this pause. Brå 2025:7 finds under-representation, or no overrepresentation, among migrants from high-income countries and among people admitted for work or study, and higher rates from low-income and conflict origins. A serious pause aims at the second group, not at a Japanese engineer or a Korean graduate student. Germany’s pattern is the same shape. Japanese and Chinese nationals are not the non-German overrepresentation.
Rotherham is what it looks like when institutions refuse the specific noun. The Jay inquiry in 2014 found at least 1,400 children exploited from 1997 to 2013, and found that authorities looked away partly for fear of racism accusations. A statute that will not name origin will not protect the next town either.