Any American inclined to satisfaction at France's failed policies toward immigrants should reflect for a moment on the images of America broadcast to the world from New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Poor, mostly black Americans were left to fend for themselves, and some did so by looting everything in sight and engaging in general lawlessness.
The United States and France both have a problem with an underclass; they'
re just different problems.
Wrong, they are the same problem. Non-Whites trying to live in a White civilization.
In the United States, the persistent poverty and other struggles of African-Americans result from slavery and centuries of racism. Its a situation the nation began to address -- following horrific racial violence -- in the 1960s. Significant, but obviously still inadequate, progress has been made.
Because the United States is a nation of immigrants, however, it does a much better job of integrating immigrants fully into society than any European country, and that includes France. The French's vaunted "integration" model simply doesn't work. It rejects pluralism and says it wants French men and women instead of African-French or Arab-French or Islamic-French, but the reality is different.
While the rejection of diversity robs immigran
ts o
f an important piece of their identity, they ultimately find that they're really not accepted as completely French. So they don't know what they are. Sure, the immigrants get free health care and education; overall, they live a lot better than poor Americans. But many of them have no hope, and young second- and third-generation men have had it. They a
re discriminated against in the workplace, ghettoized in where they live, and taunted and harassed by a national police force that has very few ties to their communities. They are isolated, uncertain and frustrated.
In effect, the French have used a generous dole to buy the immigrants off while keeping them at arm's length, and it hasn't worked. What these young people need are real opportunities to emerge from their isolation and participate fully in French society.
As in the United States, the state must have a large hand in creating those opportunities. France needs a war on poverty that focuses on creating opportunity rat
her than
warehousing people in huge tracts of government-provided housing. It also needs a simultaneous civil rights movement that ensures the opportunities are open to all and that forces diversity in police departments, government, schools and other public structures. Multiculturalism, so often maligned in the United States, has been very good for America, and France now
needs a big helping of it to overcome its bedrock racism and xenophobia.
Combined, the war on poverty and civil rights movements have had a dramatic, lasting effect on the United States. They were America's healthy response to racial violence in the 1960s, and they should be France's wise response to the violence of today.
