The first thing to establish is that European countries really are having a more difficult time with cultural pluralism. I think this is right, but it's not immediately obvious either way. When Donald Trump is leading the Republican primary in the US saying he wants to deport all Muslims, clearly even the US has a long way to go in terms of cultural pluralism. So it's worth looking carefully into which countries have done better and worse in absorbing immigrants from other cultures, and why that might be.
But I do think Europe is having a harder time of it lately, and I think the main reason for that is that Europe doesn't have nearly as long a history of mixing different cultures and ethnic groups as Canada and especially the US do. Most European nations were more or less defined by their ethnic groups until quite recently, and in very narrow ways---if you think French versus German is a silly distinction, try Czech versus Slovakian. The European Union has been either a cause or a consequence (or both) of greater cultural and economic integration across Europe; but the process is far from finished, and there are still many political and cultural conflicts even between countries within Europe.
This was in turn compounded by the sheer magnitude of immigration from predominantly-Muslim countries to Europe as a result of conflicts in the Middle East. There are now over 25 million Muslim immigrants in Europe, the majority of them in Russia. Some small countries such as Cyprus and Bulgaria are now over 10% Muslim when they were nowhere near that a few decades ago.
For comparison, the US only has about 2 million Muslim immigrants, and the vast majority of immigrants to the US are Christian, primarily from Latin America.
Since Europe and the US have comparable populations (the EU has about 510 million people, the US has about 320 million), the relative difference here is quite staggering.
Most economists concur that the long-run impact of immigration on a country's economy is positive. More workers entering the country means more GDP, and immigrants tend to be young and therefore have long work lives ahead of them. This is something Europe desperately needs, as their birth rates are now so low that their population is getting older and putting more and more strain on retirement systems.
The short-run impact is more mixed, however.
First, there are the cultural tensions such as we are observing; both the immigrants and the receiving nation will have to make adaptations to their practices in order to live together, but hope to do so without sacrificing their moral values. A good example of conflict here is hijab; many Muslim women consider wearing hijab to be a moral duty, while many Europeans consider this to be unjust oppression of the rights of women. Who is right is not entirely clear; perhaps neither are. But in any case the disagreement creates a great deal of friction.
Eventually, cultures that mix tend to resolve their differences and work together, and historically nations that are more culturally pluralistic are also more prosperous. For example, intermixing between Europe and the US or the US and Japan has contributed a great deal to innovations in art, science, and technology. But this process can take a very long time---generations, really---and a lot of damage can be done in the meantime. Racist and ethnocentrist attitudes and institutions can in fact persist for centuries.
Second, there are winners and losers in the economic game. Most immigrants are of a relatively low skill level, and tend to substitute for other low-skill workers, which can in the short run drive up unemployment and exacerbate poverty. The typical pattern is that immigrants are always good for high-skill workers (this is true even of high-skill immigrants), but are a mixed bag for low-skill workers, lowering their wages temporarily before raising them in the long run.
The immigrants, by the way, are almost always better off; that's why they were willing to go through the tremendous effort and risk involved in traveling thousands of miles in the first place. When assessing the costs and benefits of immigration, it's important not to leave them out of the equation.
Of course, there is little anyone can actually do to stop the immigration anyway---even radical, draconian policies would only slow it down, and would end up violating human rights on a huge scale. Instead we need to be finding ways to ease the transition, and help Europe absorb its newcomers with a minimum of conflict.
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