Which would you rather have in your capital city: A terrorist attack in the center or a weeklong riot on the outskirts? After the experience of last July, most Londoners would probably be tempted to opt for the latter. The damage inflicted by the Tube and bus bombings far exceeds the cost of the recent mayhem in Paris’ eastern suburbs.
On the other hand, the perpetrators of the 7/7 bombings could be counted on the fingers of one hand. By contrast, no one knows just how many young men took to the streets of Paris last week, but there were certainly hundreds. Britain and France face roughly the same problem at the moment. But there is good reason to think that France’s is bigger.
Just what is the problem? Nicolas Sarkozy, the brazenly ambitious French interior minister, denounced the rioters as “scum’’ and “thugs,’’ having earlier vowed to “clean up’’ the areas where the violence took place.
This was the cue for his foes on the left to blame the trouble on Sarkozy’s heavy-handed approach to policing. Meanwhile, his foes on the right pointed the finger of blame at immigration. After all, the cars are burning in suburbs where immigrant communities predominate.
Sarkozy is, in fact, engaged in a clever piece of political triangulation. Having already bid for immigrants’ support with offers of affirmative action programs and votes for noncitizens who are long-term residents, he now needs to send a signal to the French right that he also knows how to be tough. The real question is whether this mix of carrots and sticks is a credible cure for a divided city.
The problem is not immigration per se but a failure of integration. France has the highest foreign-born population of any European country — more than 10 percent. Yet this is a legacy of past immigration, not present.
The French have a low immigration rate and are notably unsympathetic to those who seek political asylum. These days, most newcomers are joining family members who have been in France for years, if not decades. The trouble is, they are moving to ghettoes with miserable economic prospects. The unemployment rate among foreign-born residents is more than twice the national average, which is already high enough at more than nine percent. Immigrants are also heavily overrepresented in French jails.
Revealingly, the rioters who have so far been arrested are nearly all the sons and grandsons of immigrants. Their life stories are sorry chronicles of educational underachievement, unemployment and petty crime in benighted enclaves such as Clichy-sous-Bois and Neuilly-sur-Marne. Immigration need not mean social exclusion. Most of the people who move from poor countries to rich countries do so with the best of intentions — to work hard and make a better life for themselves and their children.
Compared with Europe, the United States has long excelled at integrating newcomers. Not so long ago I was at a school in southern Texas, not far from the Mexican border. The day began with the entire class singing a ditty that went like this: “I am proud to be an American, be an American, be an American / I am proud to be an American, living in the USA — OK!’’ Deeply corny, no doubt. But these little kids sang — albeit in distinct Latino accents — with real gusto.
Longtime Americans take for granted the language and civics tests that would-be Americans have to take. But they’re not easy. One question in the official “Guide to Naturalization’’ is: “Who said, ‘Give me liberty or give me death?’” I had no idea it was Patrick Henry. My favorite sample question is: “Who helped the Pilgrims in America?’’ The answer to that one is: “The American Indians/Native Americans’’ — a fine example of the American habit of accentuating the positive. The problem in Europe is partly economic. In free-market America, immigrants get jobs; they are not much more likely to be unemployed than workers born in the US. But the second problem is that Europeans do not try hard enough to make immigrants integrate culturally. In Britain, an English-language test for would-be citizens was introduced only last year, and only last week did they begin testing for knowledge of “Life in the UK.’’
This would be progress if the test were any good. Alas, there are only two questions on British history, and they are: “Where have migrants come from in the past and why?’’ and “What sort of work have they done?’’
The irony is that it is Americans, not Europeans, who are consumed with worry about the social consequences of immigration. In the last few weeks, I have heard repeated expressions of anxiety about the growth of California’s — and the country’s — Latino population. My colleague here at Hoover, Victor Davis Hanson, fears he will soon be living in “Mexifornia,’’ echoing the worries expressed not so long ago by Harvard’s Samuel Huntington. Only last week, Dick Lamm, the former Democratic governor of Colorado, gave an extraordinary speech in Washington prophesying the “destruction of America’’ through multilingualism, multiculturalism and “victimology.’’
They are, of course, right to worry. The United States needs to safeguard its tradition of effective economic and cultural integration. But as my own immigration to the United States proceeds, I tend to worry much more about Europe. For Mexicans are not Moroccans: Muslim immigrants are clearly harder to integrate. And the United States is not yet suffering a British-style historical amnesia. Nor, thankfully, are the fires of disintegration already burning, as they are in Sarkozy’s France.

Discrimination, not religious fervor behind French riots
Robert S. Leiken

The riots in France should be no surprise to anyone familiar with that country or, for that matter, with Western Europe. For more than a decade, police officers, firefighters and ambulance drivers have faced stones or firebombs even as they perform their jobs in the French Muslim ghettos. And the young Muslims living in these banlieues outside Paris, Lyon and Marseilles are no less alienated than those living near Amsterdam, Barcelona and London.
In the summer of 2001, three cities in northern England erupted in rioting, and in November 2002, Antwerp, Belgium, also saw widespread violence in Muslim neighborhoods.
Strictly speaking, it is not immigrants who are doing the rebelling but their adolescent and young-adult children and grandchildren. In the United States, the revolt of the second generation may mean Latino gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha. But in Europe, the great fear is that second-generation Muslim rebels may become recruits for jihad.
Already the Paris riots have produced copycats not only in French cities but in Belgium and Germany. That’s not surprising, as the socioeconomic and cultural dynamics are common across Western Europe
Although the census in France, like most European countries, does not inquire into religion, there are believed to be about 5 million Muslims in France, and close to 20 million in Western Europe. Continued immigration and high fertility will double that population by 2025, according to the CIA’s National Intelligence Council.
Across Europe, colonial history and immigration networks have combined to bring specific Muslim minorities to each country. Thus, France hosts North Africans, Britain has South Asians, Spain has Moroccans, and Germany is primarily home to Turks. These tight-knit communities often share a language, ethnicity and Islam — and in bad times, resentment travels fast.
In France, Muslims make up as much as 10 percent of the total population; in the Netherlands, it is more than 4 percent; in Germany and Belgium, about 3.7 percent; and in Britain, roughly 3 percent. But in all these countries, the Muslim underclass lives a life without much opportunity for work, in subsidized housing, reliant on free healthcare and generous unemployment checks. Young Muslims born in Europe, who in most countries are citizens, are entitled to welfare and won’t be enticed off it by jobs and wages inferior to those of their factory worker parents. While second-generation Muslims suffer disproportionate unemployment, Eastern Europeans are pouring in by the millions to take low-wage jobs.
The young Muslims’ parents and grandparents, like their counterparts all over Europe, came as guest workers in the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s. After the boom turned to bust, ethnic and human rights organizations argued they not only had a right to stay in Europe but that they could bring their families in to be with them. Quietly, without anyone noticing or planning it, lone workers imported solely for their labor became communities with customs, traditions and a religion that often did not fit seamlessly into Europe.
As citizens of a nation of immigrants, Americans tend to idealize the process of assimilation, as though people can change countries like sweaters. But even in countries such as ours, the transition can be painful to both newcomers and their hosts. European countries are ethnic nations, which makes it doubly hard for them to treat immigrants or their children as their own. A French research group recently conducted a study in which two resumes, identical except for the name, were submitted in answer to want ads. The resumes with French names received five times the responses of the Arab ones.
It is such discrimination, not Islamic fervor, that is seen as sparking the riots. But will some of the fury be focused into jihad?
Actually, mainstream Muslim organizations have tried to mediate the conflict. So has the French offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, the organization that gave birth to Islamism. But the mediators turned into targets. Dalil Boubakeur, the government-backed imam of the Paris Grand Mosque, had his car pelted with stones when he went to console the town where the outbreak started.
Can Muslim elders rein in the rioters? If not, the jihadists stand at the ready. The rioters have been receiving Internet and cellphone text messages of warning, coordination and encouragement, apparently from extremists. The jihadists may wish to encourage the riots until the French suppress them, leaving angry young men to conclude that rioting begets only prison (where many will fall under radical influence) and that terror is the answer. Left angry, desperate or coldly calculating, these radicalized young people, like any European citizen, would be eligible for visa-free travel to the United States.

Cultural diversity strengthens nations
Kazuo Ogoura

During UNESCO’s recent biannual conference at its Paris headquarters, the United States remained adamant in its opposition to the conclusion of an international convention on cultural diversity. On the surface it appears that the U.S. position is mainly motivated by trade interests. The U.S. seems to be worried that this concept of cultural diversity might be abused to distort international trade. Many American negotiators recall that in the last stage of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations, the French government, among others, insisted on cultural exceptions to the international convention on investment and free trade.
Meanwhile, the French and other Europeans are worried about the preponderance of so-called cultural industries controlled by American capital, typified by Hollywood’s domination of the global film industry. They are seeking to safeguard domestically produced film, television, music, literature and art based on the argument that these representations of culture merit preservation for their own sake. The American opposition to the convention on cultural diversity appears to stem from concern over the means that governments may employ to protect local cultures when faced with large-scale inroads from foreign cultural industries.
American opposition to the convention, however, also seems to go beyond simple economics. Many Americans seem reluctant to recognize some of the concepts that underpin the importance of cultural diversity because, in their view, calls for cultural diversity are sometimes made as a way to oppose American cultural influence. As long as groups working to resist American ideals or principles employ cultural diversity as a catchword, it is quite natural for Americans to be reluctant to embrace this expression as a synonym for international efforts to protect the world’s wealth of cultures and traditions precious to the entire human community.
What I find worrisome is not the general American reluctance to adopt this phrase but rather the underlying trend in contemporary American society of apparent opposition to the notion of cultural diversity. Specifically, there appears to be a movement in contemporary U.S. society to restore a more traditional form of American culture while simultaneously pushing back the inroads made by Hispanic and other cultures. A somewhat alarming thesis imagines floods of Mexican immigrants dividing and weakening traditional American culture. Whatever the intentions of those who expound them, the existence of such ideas suggests an undercurrent of thought in American society that seeks to restore a more homogenous vision of America, to the detriment of cultural diversity.
If this trend continues, and if cultural diversity is denied or neglected, it will endanger the development of human society, for diversity ultimately provides flexibility. One can easily grasp this link between diversity and flexibility by considering biological diversity in nature. Unless biological diversity is maintained, living species cannot survive climatic and ecological change. And just as biological diversity guarantees the survival of species in spite of environmental changes, so cultural diversity provides for the survival of human civilizations.
Unless we are able to maintain global cultural diversity, human societies may not be able to adjust to the sudden social and cultural changes of the present, much less those of the future. In order to safeguard the richness of human traditions, we must take measures to ensure the maintenance of cultural diversity.