Careful What You Wish For

This continuing story? about rioting by Muslim youths in France (that is now spreading, not only across the country, but into Belgium and Germany) has led to some peculiar cheerleading on the right. They hate France, but they hate Arabs, and they're not sure who to hate MORE.

I think this episode should be a wake-up call to those who want to turn American immigration policy into a virtual mirror of European laws and rules. France treats immigrants, particularly Muslim immigrants, like shit. They let them in so they can have a pool of cheap labor, then shuttle them into ghettos (which, as we remember from a couple months ago, are combustible), make no effort toward any affirmative action so they can get out of poverty, stress French identity and national unity at the expense of cultural diversity, and ban even the wearing of head scarves in public schools. Only recently has the country even attempted to change these policies, and it clearly wasn't fast enough. I see these riots in France as a natural parallel to the riots in Watts and Detroit and elsewhere in the 1960s. That fundamentalist Islamists may try to capitalize on the unrest is probably an open question. But this is about how outsiders are treated in a closed society, exactly the type of closed society many on the far right of the immigration question want to bring to this country.

I don't know how this situation gets resolved. Lowering unemployment, improving schools and living conditions, and generally enhancing quality of life so that there isn't a permanent seething underclass is the long-term answer. In the short term, only community leaders will end the violence by community members, just like in the race riots here. There's very little the governments can do immediately, outside of imposing martial law. But it should be a lesson that you can't keep an entire group of people in chains without them wanting to break free.