more fear and loathing in France, wingers laughing up their sleeves
- From: hal@xxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 07 Nov 2005 12:09:42 -0700
Last week, October 27th, riots broke out in the impoverished suburbs
of Paris, France. Sparked by the deaths of 2 North African
immigrants who were accidentally electrocuted to death after being
chased by the Police. It's day 11 today, schools and businesses have
been torched in over 15 cities, well over a thousand vehicles have
been burned, and the violence/arson spread last Saturday even to the
capital city of Paris itself.
We've had our riots too, in the 60's, because of racial tensions, and
most recently in the early 90's. Where decades of resentment come
boiling to the surface after a single incident, such as the videotaped
beating of Rodney King in 1992.
North African immigrants in France have been historically
discriminated against, where about 50% of them are under 25 years of
age and where they are frequently denied jobs, thus they tend to live
and feel suppressed in these run down public housing projects. Their
unemployment rates are among the highest in France. A structural
underclass has definitely emerged in France, but unfortunately,
because of "national pride", the French government, and French people
refuse to acknowledge this problem.
There have been some heated debates as to whether the problem in
France is caused by a growing demographic of Muslims there. But it is
interesting to note that there are some major differences between the
USA and Europe that can help us to understand better the phenomenon of
Muslims living in the West. The main difference is the social and
economic composition of the Muslim community. In the USA, due to our
immigration policies, Muslim immigrants are composed largely of middle
class doctors, engineers, academics and the like. This gives the
community a greater social confidence and a positive sense of
belonging. In Europe, by and large, the Muslim community remains stuck
in the underclass. With the failure on the political scene of
spectacular proportions. For example, Britain has almost two million
Muslims, but they have not been able to win a single seat in
Parliament.
Here's a very good link, it shows how the Republicans, here in the
United States, are pursuing the same exact immigration policies that
the French have been, and it's for the most part a failed policy, read
"Approach #4: La Mission Civilitrice".
Abel Malcolm
______
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/weekinreview/06smith.html
November 6, 2005
France Has an Underclass, but Its Roots Are Still Shallow
By CRAIG S. SMITH
PARIS - Just two months ago, the French watched in horrified
fascination at the anarchy of New Orleans, where members of America's
underclass were seen looting stores and defying the police in the wake
of Hurricane Katrina.
Last week, as rioters torched cars and trashed businesses in the
immigrant-concentrated suburbs of Paris, the images of wild gangs of
young men silhouetted against the yellow flames of burning cars came
as an unwelcome reminder for France that it has its own growing
underclass.
The coincidence of timing can be revealing - and deceptive.
The corrosive gap between America's whites and its racial minorities,
especially African-Americans, is the product of centuries: slavery,
followed by cycles of poverty and racial exclusion that denied
generation after generation the best the United States could offer.
France, on the other hand, is only beginning to struggle with a much
newer variant of the same problem: the fury of Muslims of North
African descent who have found themselves caught for three generations
in a trap of ethnic and religious discrimination.
Even so, France is still low on the curve toward developing an
entrenched, structural underclass - one that could breed extremism and
lasting social problems.
So far, while hundreds of cars and buses have been burned and dozens
of businesses destroyed in violence that has spread to a dozen towns,
most rioters appear to be teenage boys bent more on making the news
than making a coherent political statement.
"It's a game of cowboys and Indians," said Olivier Roy, a French
scholar of European Islam. He is usually keen to warn Europeans of the
potential danger posed by Islamists living among them. But in this
case, he said, the danger is a long-range one. So far, he said, the
attacks on the police and the torching of cars has less the character
of a religious war than of "a local sport, a rite of passage."
The violence, on the other hand, reflects something that any American
who lived through the urban upheavals of the 1960's, or the 1992 riots
in Los Angeles, might recognize: a dangerous degree of isolation felt
by a growing segment of its population, especially its young.
Although many Americans feel that their country still has a lot of
work
to do to close the gap between blacks and whites, the social protests
and urban upheavals of the 1960's produced a stream of measures
intended to increase political and economic opportunities rapidly for
members of minority groups, and to stress the value of diversity to a
democracy. By contrast, the French model has so far relied largely on
expensive measures to keep poor Muslims fed, housed and educated, but
has not effectively addressed the social or political isolation they
feel from job and housing discrimination, and has actually limited
their ability to define themselves as a political interest group.
Affirmative action, a cornerstone of the American approach, has been a
taboo here.
Manuel Valls, a member of Parliament and mayor of Evry, a troubled
suburb south of Paris that has seen its share of violence in the past
few days, put it this way: "We've combined the failure of our
integration model with the worst effects of ghettoization, without a
social ladder for people to climb."
"In the U.S. and Britain, the communities help create opportunities
for
advancement," he continued. But in France "the state and the
politicians have left the playing field open for a political-religious
response - that's undeniable."
Still, because France's difficulties are relatively recent, it may
have
a chance to escape the depth of the American problems.
For one thing, the physical conditions in these neighborhoods have not
begun to rival poor urban areas in the United States. Even in the
worst
government housing developments, green lawns and neat flower beds
break
the monotony of the gray concrete.
There are more than 700 such neighborhoods in the country, housing
nearly five million people or about 8 percent of the population.
The despair in these housing projects (called cites here) has been
mitigated by better schools than those that serve poor, minority
districts in the United States (education is financed nationally in
France, rather than through local tax rolls) and by extensive welfare
programs. Even when employed, a family of four living in a
government-subsidized apartment typically pays only a few hundred
dollars a month in rent and can receive more than $1,200 a month in
various subsidies. The unemployed receive more. For all, health care
and education are free.
There is crime, but not nearly at the level of random violence feared
in poor neighborhoods in American cities. Guns are tightly controlled
and are still relatively rare. When a teenager was killed in a
drive-by
shooting in a Paris suburb this year, it made national headlines. The
family unit among immigrants is still strong, as are ties to their
homelands.
But that tight social fabric is fraying as the second and now third
generations of French-born immigrants come of age. On two levels, many
young immigrants find themselves questioning where they really belong.
They have weaker ties than their parents did to their ancestral
countries, but they are also discovering that, contrary to what they
have been taught in school, they are not fully French.
That is one foundation of the fear among some experts that a
structural
underclass is emerging. Already, French-Arabs and French-Africans make
up the majority of inmates in France's prisons, just as minorities
make
up a vastly disproportionate part of the American prison population.
France's definition of citizenship also presents problems. While the
United States stresses pluralism, France continues to discourage
anything that could carve up the French body politic along ethnic
lines; the word "communautarisme," which roughly translates as
ghettoization, is known to all French as a destructive force that
afflicts, most notably, the United States.
It was only in 2003 that the French government encouraged the
formation
of an umbrella Islamic organization that could represent French
Muslims
in a dialogue with the state. The overall policy has only increased
Muslim resentments by banning any form of affirmative action and by
suppressing cultural expression in measures like forbidding Muslim
girls to wear veils in school.
As in the United States, most experts agree that in the long run, full
employment would be the best way to solve the problems and accelerate
integration. Here, the comparison between the history of American
minority groups and those in France seems particularly close. The
jobless rate among French-Arabs and French-Africans is as high as 30
percent in some neighborhoods, triple the national average.
French-Arabs regularly claim that when identical resumes are submitted
to an employer with an Arab name on one and a French name on another,
the résumé with the French name will get the priority.
That much, at least, may be changing. In March, President Jacques
Chirac appointed the chairman of the automaker Renault, Louis
Schweitzer, to head a council created to fight job and housing
discrimination. The country is also engaged in a debate over whether
to
bend its laws to allow affirmative action in the job market.
"The picture of France as a country that doesn't want to recognize
diversity - that's partially true," said Patrick Weil, an expert on
immigration and integration based in Paris for the German Marshall
Fund. "But there's a debate now about what steps should be taken to
change that."
.
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