It was, I suppose, easy to dismiss the ritualistic murder of Theo Van Gough at the hands of a European Muslim. Afterall, that was but one looney fanatic, and he was white to boot!
PARIS BURNING
Why Immigrrants Don't Riot Here
France's rigid economic system sustains privilege and inspires resentment.
BY JOEL KOTKIN
Tuesday, November 8, 2005 12:01 a.m.
The French political response to the continuing riots has focused most on the need for more multicultural "understanding" of, and public spending on, the disenchanted mass in the country's grim banlieues (suburbs). What has been largely ignored has been the role of France's economic system in contributing to the current crisis. State-directed capitalism may seem ideal for American admirers such as Jeremy Rifkin, author of "The European Dream," and others on the left. Yet it is precisely this highly structured and increasingly infracted economic system that has so limited opportunities for immigrants and their children. In a country where short workweeks and early retirement are sacred, there is little emphasis on creating new jobs and even less on grass-roots entrepreneurial activity.Since the '70s, America has created 57 million new jobs, compared with just four million in Europe (with most of those jobs in government). In France and much of Western Europe, the economic system is weighted toward the already employed (the overwhelming majority native-born whites) and the growing mass of retirees. Those ensconced in state and corporate employment enjoy short weeks, early and well-funded retirement and first dibs on the public purse. So although the retirement of large numbers of workers should be opening up new job opportunities, unemployment among the young has been rising: In France, joblessness among workers in their 20s exceeds 20%, twice the overall national rate. In immigrant banlieues, where the population is much younger, average unemployment reaches 40%, and higher among the young.
To make matters worse, the elaborate French welfare state--government spending accounts for roughly half of GDP compared with 36% in the U.S.--also forces high tax burdens on younger workers lucky enough to have a job, largely to pay for an escalating number of pensioners and benefit recipients. In this system, the incentives are to take it easy, live well and then retire. The bloat of privileged aging blocks out opportunity for the young.
Luckily, better-educated young Frenchmen and other Continental Europeans can opt out of the system by emigrating to more open economies in Ireland, the U.K. and, particularly, the U.S. This is clearly true in technological fields, where Europe's best brains leave in droves. Some 400,000 European Union science graduates currently reside in the U.S. Barely one in seven, according to a recent poll, intends to return. Driven by the ambitious young, European immigration to the U.S. jumped by 16% during the '90s. Visa applications dropped after 9/11, but then increased last year by 10%. The total number of Europe-born immigrants increased by roughly 700,000 during the last three years, with a heavy inflow from the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, and Romania--as well as France. These new immigrants have been particularly drawn to the metropolitan centers of California, Florida and New York.
The Big Apple offers a lesson for France. An analysis of recent census numbers indicates that immigrants to New York are the biggest contributors to the net growth of educated young people in the city. Without the disproportionate contributions of young European immigrants, New York would have suffered a net outflow of educated people under 35 in the late '90s. Overall, there are now 500,000 New York residents who were born in Europe (not to mention the numerous non-European immigrants who live, and prosper, in the city).
Contrast this with Paris, where the central city is largely off-limits to immigrants, in some ways due to the dirigiste planning that so many professional American urbanists find appealing. Since Napoleon III rebuilt Paris, uprooting many existing working-class communities, the intention of the French elites has been to preserve the central parts of the city--often with massive public investment--for the affluent. This has consigned the proletariat, first white and now increasingly Muslim, to the proximate suburbs--into what some French sociologists call "territorial stigma." In these communities, immigrants are effectively isolated from the overpriced, elegant central core and the ever-expanding outer suburban grand couronne. The outer suburbs, usually not on the maps of tourists and new urbanist sojourners, now are home to a growing percentage of French middle-class families, and are the locale for many high-tech companies and business service firms.
The contrast with America's immigrants, including those from developing countries, could not be more dramatic, both in geographic and economic terms. The U.S. still faces great problems with a portion of blacks and American Indians. But for the most part immigrants, white and nonwhite, have been making considerable progress. Particularly telling, immigrant business ownership has been surging far faster than among native-born Americans. Ironically, some of the highest rates for ethnic entrepreneurship in the U.S. belong to Muslim immigrants, along with Russians, Indians, Israelis and Koreans.
Perhaps nothing confirms immigrant upward mobility more than the fact that the majority have joined the white middle class in the suburbs--a geography properly associated here mostly with upward mobility. These newcomers and their businesses have carved out a powerful presence in suburban areas that now count among the nation's most diverse regions. Prime examples include what demographer Bill Frey calls "melting pot suburbs": the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles; Arlington County, Va.; Essex County, N.J.; and Fort Bend County in suburban Houston. The connection between this spreading geography and immigrant opportunity is not coincidental. Like other Americans, immigrants often dramatically improve their quality of life and economic prospects by moving out to less dense, faster growing areas. They can also take advantage of more business-friendly government. Perhaps the most extreme case is Houston, a low-cost, low-tax haven where immigrant entrepreneurship has exploded in recent decades. Much of this has taken place in the city itself. Looser regulations and a lack of zoning lower land and rental costs, providing opportunities to build businesses and acquire property.
It is almost inconceivable to see such flowerings of ethnic entrepreneurship in Continental Europe. Economic and regulatory policy plays a central role in stifling enterprise. Heavy-handed central planning tends to make property markets expensive and difficult to penetrate. Add to this an overall regulatory regime that makes it hard for small business to start or expand, and you have a recipe for economic stagnation and social turmoil. What would help France most now would be to stimulate economic growth and lessen onerous regulation. Most critically, this would also open up entrepreneurial and employment opportunity for those now suffering more of a nightmare of closed options than anything resembling a European dream.
Finn d'Abuzz wrote:The issues are:
What do these riots say about France now, and what do they portend for the future of France, and by extension Europe?
Do I understand you correct: you want to leave the USA out, but the other European countries included?
Yes Walter.
nimn, quite a bold statement to say that French immigrants,
who are mostly second and third generation immigrants by
now, are where blacks in the US were in the late sixties.
Finn d'Abuzz wrote:It was, I suppose, easy to dismiss the ritualistic murder of Theo Van Gough at the hands of a European Muslim. Afterall, that was but one looney fanatic, and he was white to boot!
Pst - the murderer of Van Gogh actually was an Arab, btw ... Mohammed B.
Perhaps you were confused with the murderer of Fortuyn (a white environmentalist) or the two men with terrorist plans who were later smoked out of their Hague hideout in a gunfight (non-Arabs born of American parents), or the 17-year old who made a bomb that he wanted to kill Geert Wilders with (a converted white Dutchman), or the Muslim extremist who sent death threats to Belgian Senator Mimount Bousakla (a white Flemish convert).
Walter you are perfectly welcome to include America in the discussion as it applies to the impact of immigrants on the cultural, political, and day-to-day life of the host country.
Latino riots (of which there have been none in the US) would be far more relevant to this discussion that those involving African-Americans.
The U.S. also has large pockets of Muslim immigrants spread throughout the country and our immigrants do quite well here. So if comparisons are to be made, perhaps the focus should be on more closely examining the economic/social/cultural differences between France and the U.S.
A white man with a French first and last name is five times more likely to be called in for a job interview than a man with a Northern African name with a similar resume, according to a 2004 study by sociologist Jean-Francois Amadieu and Adia, a Paris- based human resources consultant and temporary job company. [..]
National Police Chief Michel Gaudin said yesterday that measures will be taken to change recruitment patterns in the police and hire more people from ethnic minorities, as in countries such as the U.K.
Now the question why Latinos have not faced quite that level of exclusion and fear is interesting, because it does mean that we have a lot to learn from Americans when it comes to dealing with immigration.
A loud 'non' to quotas based on race
France appears to have brought three weeks of rioting under control, but it remains divided on where to go from here.
Supporters of positive discrimination, as affirmative action is known in France, include interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy.
But he was effectively overruled Monday by President Chirac, who derided the "logic of quotas" in a nationally televised speech.
Employment minister Larcher said the government did not believe it was the job of French companies to fix the country's social problems by hiring people from France's troubled suburbs.
"Companies are not the Salvation Army," he said.
A Socialist MP said recently that France needed positive discrimination, but only on "social and geographical grounds, not religious or ethnic ones."
But Sarkozy has said he supports programs like scholarships for bright minority youths and more recruiting efforts in areas with minorities.
"There are regions and categories of French people that have so many handicaps that if we don't help them they will never make it."
In many ways positive discrimination programs already exist but they are directed at poverty instead of ethnic groups. The government has implemented "tax-free zones" near housing projects, and the Mitterrand government instituted Priority Education Zones for underprivileged children, which still exist.
Chirac on Monday proposed a voluntary civil service to help train young people. In all, 50,000 slots would be available in the civil service, starting in 2007.
Finn d'Abuzz wrote:Walter you are perfectly welcome to include America in the discussion as it applies to the impact of immigrants on the cultural, political, and day-to-day life of the host country.
Latino riots (of which there have been none in the US) would be far more relevant to this discussion that those involving African-Americans.
I don't agree.
Yes, there is the obvious fact that Latinos are immigrants (or children thereof) and the rioters in France mostly are too, whereas African-Americans are not.
But that's hardly the only relevant criterium.
For example, I don't think the level of fear and exclusion North-African immigrants, especially, face in France (and other West-European countries too) is at all comparable to what American Latinos face. It is more similar to what blacks have faced.
Similarly, within especially North-African immigrant communities we see a number of things that remind me a lot of what was going on in the black community in the US, and doesn't seem to have occurred much among Latinos. A certain cultivation of victimhood, justified by the fear and exclusion encountered. Resulting anger. The attitude that, "they only expect us to be thugs anyway, so OK - we can do that, if thats all they think we're good for anyway!". A kind of political militantism, which is not so much - in spite of popular opinion among whites - of the pious Islamist variety, but of a more Malcolm X-type. Thats what Abou Jahjah's Arab-European League put forward: they, the majority, dont want us anyway, so lets do things for ourselves, make our own power, resist. (The Belgian political list Jahjah ended up spearheading was called RESIST).
None of this seems particularly similar to the US Latino community, but much of it is familar from American (and British) blacks. They've even adopted its cultural expressions: whereas ten years ago, young Dutch Moroccans could mostly be found at Rai concerts (Algerian pop), now its Moroccan-Dutch hip-hoppers like Raymzter, Ali B, etc who are dominant.
So, if the similarities are more with American blacks than with Latinos, perhaps the immigrant identity is not all that counts, here? Perhaps the experience of being outsiders within, being expected to conform and be loyal, but never taken for full, perhaps the experience of discrimination and (depending on the country) police violence - all things that American blacks have had to face (even) more than Latinos - characterise the resulting resentment at least as much?
Now the question why Latinos have not faced quite that level of exclusion and fear is interesting, because it does mean that we have a lot to learn from Americans when it comes to dealing with immigration.
Riot coverage 'excessive', says French TV boss
One of France's leading TV news executives has admitted censoring his coverage of the riots in the country for fear of encouraging support for far-right politicians. Jean-Claude Dassier, the director general of the rolling news service TCI, said the prominence given to the rioters on international news networks had been 'excessive' and could even be fanning the flames of the violence.
Dassier said his own channel, which is owned by the private broadcaster TF1, recently decided not to show footage of burning cars. 'Journalism is not simply a matter of switching on the cameras and letting them roll. You have to think about what you're broadcasting,' Dassier yesterday told an audience of broadcasters at the News Xchange conference in Amsterdam .
French broadcasters have faced criticism for their lack of coverage of the country's worst civil unrest in decades. Public television station France 3 has stopped broadcasting the numbers of torched cars while other TV stations are considering following suit. 'Do we send teams of journalists because cars are burning, or are the cars burning because we sent teams of journalists?' asked Patrick Lecocq, editor-in-chief of France 2.
Source: http://media.guardian.co.uk - Media Guardian
Interesting ...
Quote:Riot coverage 'excessive', says French TV boss
One of France's leading TV news executives has admitted censoring his coverage of the riots in the country for fear of encouraging support for far-right politicians. Jean-Claude Dassier, the director general of the rolling news service TCI, said the prominence given to the rioters on international news networks had been 'excessive' and could even be fanning the flames of the violence.
Dassier said his own channel, which is owned by the private broadcaster TF1, recently decided not to show footage of burning cars.
Interesting when they say it--wrong and racist when I said they did exactly what they now admit they did.
They played it down. Who doubts they ALSO played down the number of rioters who expressed religious reasons for their rioting?
Interesting when they say it--wrong and racist when I said they did exactly what they now admit they did.
They played it down. Who doubts they ALSO played down the number of rioters who expressed religious reasons for their rioting?
