A Bus to Nowhere
The riots in France are exposing to public attention the effects of years of deeply dysfunctional policies in France. Not only deep and prolonged unemployment, but also (and this is somewhat surprising in France, which has long pronounced a policy of civic republicanism) a failure to assimilate Muslim immigrants into the wider culture in a way that would make them feel an accepted part of the social order. Are other European countries (I have especially Germany in mind) on the same path?
A good dose of labor law liberalization might go a long way toward promoting such assimilation. But then, we’re talking about France, here.
What’s truly depressing (besides the riots) is the poverty of commentary thereupon. A lot of anti-immigration, anti-Muslim conservatives are jumping on these events to scream, “SEE? That’s what happens when you worship multiculturalism and allow unlimited immigration!” These are people who don’t know a damn thing about France, because Westerners don’t get much more pro-assimilation or anti-diversity than the French. The ghettoization of Arab and African immigrants in France is no more an example of multiculturalism than was segregation: they’re both the product of racism, not political correctness.
I’m just worried that the lessons learned here are going to be: (1) Immigrants (especially Muslims) bad; and (2) increased social spending on poor good. Which are entirely the wrong conclusions and not going to help avoid this problem in the future.
The French (and Europeans in general) need to decide whether they’re going to accept these people as full members of society and, if not, they need to be honest about their prejudices and close the door to further immigration. The current policy of letting them in (because we don’t want to look racist) but not letting them participate in society (because, well, we ARE) is insane. And beyond that, as you say, Tom, the French also need to face up to the fact that their legal system imposes artificial job rationing. That pretty much guarantees that if you’re poor and the wrong colour, there’s a good chance you’ll end up permanently outside the economic system.
– Adam
I really think the welfare state and labor law are the main culprits here and that the issue of whether France has a pro-assimilation policy is a much overemphasized side issue.
French labour laws certainly don’t help, but that factor is exacerbated by endemic racism. There’s a great movie called La Haine (“Hate”), made in 1995, that chronicles a typically empty, soulless day in the life of three friends (an Arab, an African, and a Jew). It’s both compelling and frightening (the tag line is, “It’s the story of a man falling from a building, and as he passes each floor he says, so far, so good. It’s not the fall, it’s the sudden stop”).
Highly recommended for anyone who wants a window into what might be motivating the rioters.
– Adam
Racism and French labor law go together like and hand and glove. Because regulations make it impossible for employers to seek out lower cost immigrant workers, they have every economic incentive to discriminate.
The same thing happened in the 1930s under the National Recovery Administration programs of the New Deal. Because of the minimum wage/maximum hours rule, employers had no economic incentive to hire lower cost black labor and thus indulged in racist hiring of whites only. David Bernstein’s book, Only One Place of Redress, is an excellent source on this.
While I am apt to defer to Mr Beito on the assimilation question, I wonder the following: If we posit assimilation as a social problem, what is the remedy? No one should be forced to conform, so would one suggest immigration restrictions, limiting immigration to those who are more likely to assimilate? Or, is assimilation a problem of the host population? If the French do not accept outsiders as readily as Americans, what can French politicians do? Should they do anything?
I find this train of inquiry funny, since I am at once someone who is concerned about social questions of this nature, but virulently anti-statist (to include immigration restrictions). I think, Mr Palmer, that you share those qualities, so I am curious how you suggest addressing the hypothetical problem of assimilation.
It is a horse and cart issue.
Let’s look at the U.S. example. How did our immigrants (many of whom lived in ethnic neighborhoods, read a foreign language press, and and attend parochial schools) assimilate at the turn of the century? For the most part, they did it as a natural (not forced) byproduct of a a free labor and business market climate which allowed them to achieve upward mobility.
Well, I guess there’s also a question of what we regard to be the “social problem” which the “answer” of assimilation addresses. Here, we are concerned about anti-social behavior, which more or less is disregard for private property.
We “answer” that if these people were employed, in line with an immigrant story such as Sabine Barnhard’s ( see http://tinyurl.com/dtp24 ), they would tend to adopt pro-private property tendencies. But maybe it’s not so much cart-and-horse as it is a totally orthogonal category. That is, is the term “assimilation” merely a codeword for “civilized”? Or, is there a meaningful way in which assimilation is relevant? I tend to think not. The Amish come to mind — are they assimilated into US mainstream culture, or merely in working harmony beside/within it?
In what kinds of ways does France assimilate immigrants?
It might help to distinguish different uses of the term “assimilate.” In noting that the French had failed to assimilate Muslim immigrants, I didn’t mean by the term that assimilation should entail religious conversion or adoption of culinary tastes, for example. In that sense the Amish are not “assimilated” in the U.S., simply because they maintain their distinct religious, linguistic, and moral community. Nonetheless, the Amish are assimilated into the economic and social order of the United States, on their terms. That’s not quite the same as merely “in working harmony beside/within” American society. (Economically: They don’t buy computers, but they do buy nails and thread. And they are integrated into the broader system of the division of labor through offering good and services on the market in exchange for other goods and services. Socially: they respect the rights of their neighbors and don’t use force to impose on others the strictures by which they live. Moreover, they do not keep completely to themselves, but have connections with the wider society, but again, on their own terms.)
The French state has long promoted a policy of coerced cultural assimilation to French-ness. (The state educational system, for example, has been used for centuries to assimilate German-speakers in Alsace, Breton speakers in Brittany, Provencal speakers in Provence, etc.). But for some decades they have been loathe to promote economic integration through the free market. Instead, as David Beito points out above, restrictive labor legislation has promoted unemployment and forbidden lower-skilled immigrants from competing in the market, thereby reducing the costs to racists and chauvinists of indulging in discrimination against immigrants. The result is a staggering rate of unemployment among the offspring of immigrants and a sense of isolation from the wider French society. We are seeing some of the consequences of those policies now.
Tom
There is minimal chance that the riots in france would repeat itself in Germany. The riots are mainly caused by the north african youth in france, the number of north africans is germany is very very low. I assume people will bring turks into the picture as a similarity in france but the turkish migrants are different then the north africans and are better integrated within the german society. So I dont see the turks doing the same.
Orhan is probably right about the Turkish population in Germany, partly because Germany has been getting better at bringing them into citizenship and the social order. There is still reason for doubt about the success with some populations in Germany, including the much smaller Arab population. Remember the role of the Hamburg cell in planning the 11 September attacks in the U.S. A population that is not considered a part of the society, as Arabs are not generally in Germany, may provide recruiting grounds for radical attacks on the society. There are grounds for concern in Germany and Germans should strive to do a better job to welcome immigrants into the economy and into the society.
I’m not buying arguments that the solution here is to allow French companies access to “lower cost immigrant workers”. It seems to me that such a change would simply shift the unrest from massively unemployed immigrants to what would become massively unemployed unskilled citizen workers. Perhaps (big PERHAPS) the economic growth would eventually create more jobs IF the companies enjoying the benefit create new jobs in France. I am increasingly skeptical that companies can be expected to behave this way.
How about simply having fair pay and equal access to the job market for all regardless of status?
Really, the unskilled work that employers don’t want to pay for should be handled by ILLEGAL immigrants. Hey, it works in the US!
many thoughts on this issue but this one -probably off topic- first: It takes no more than a simple phone call from the Elysee to send the 2eme REP save French citizens in the most unthinkable corners of Africa and stabilize a situation when there are riots there. It takes 15 days to stabilize the situation when these things happen in France. Go figure.
More on your questions later.
NV
Mr. Hohman raises an important question, but I’m afraid that what he suggests is precisely what hasn’t been working. The problem is that jobs are considered a resource to be shared out fairly, such that if immigrants are employed, then citizens will be unemployed (as suggested by Mr. Hohman) rather than as an exchange between contracting parties. There are as many jobs as people who are willing to undertake to contract on agreeable terms. But the French state insists that only “fair” arrangements can be contracted, i.e., arrangements with “protection” against the contract being terminated, with added “benefits” that the parties might not have agreed to, with minimum wages, and so on. The result is that many contracts to which people could have agreed are not allowed. We call that unemployment.
When the laws are such that you are not allowed to offer different terms, such as offering to work for a lower wage, you will have both unemployment and invidious discrimination, as the cost of indulging some non-wage related preference is now made costless. If you have to pay both applicants the same wage and one comes from a group you disfavor, it’s costless to discriminate against the one you disfavor, because he or she can’t compete by offering to work for less. It’s that experience of being able to work for less that overcomes differentials in skill (people who are unskilled work for less and acquire skills as they work) and erroneous perceptions of ability (as parties to contracts find that members of those groups really can work together, get the job done, etc., etc.).
The search for “fairness” is one reason that France has landed in its current predicament. When the U.S. had (indeed, it still has) a huge flow of immigrants, immigrants have found jobs precisely because they don’t “enjoy” all the fairness-based “protections” that French workers have. If we had those in the U.S., we’d have much worse unemployment, especially among the unskilled and the disfavored, who would not be allowed to acquire skills or to overcome prejudice and who would be in much the same position as north African immigrants in France today.
Adam Allouba (the first commenter) writes “What’s truly depressing (besides the riots) is the poverty of commentary thereupon.”
He should have been talking about himself. The first and the last paragraphs of his three-paragraph comment are completely contradictory.
And let me say something else.
It’s hard to realize with all the liberal/leftist propaganda, but multiculturalism IS racist. So is affirmative action in the US. The idea that the French have not adopted an official policy of multiculturalism is also wrong: beneath a coating of ‘republicanism’ they have tried to placate the immigrants on their own terms, for example by creating a distinct French form of islam. Needless to say, that has failed miserably.
In Europe multiculturalism is just the politically acceptable form of racism. You do your thing, we do ours. Separate but equal – that sort of thing.
As for Tom’s suggestion that the economy should be liberalized: sure. But that does not solve everything. There are a lot of people in France, especially in the immigrant communities, who do not want to work, particularly for the relatively low wages they would most likely earn. They think work is beneath them. If the state would cease to give it to them, they would plunder to grab it themselves. That’s why many of the riots currently going on are part of turf wars by criminal gangs: they try to keep the police out of their ‘business.’ What would you rather do: be a big-shot drug-dealer or clean public toilets?
Tom et al: I fear I’ve been slightly misunderstood. My comment was not intended as an endorsement of France’s system of social protections. I (imperfectly, of course) understand how too many restrictions can make it impossible for a company to afford to take on workers under such constraints. (I do believe that some system of protections is required so that employers cannot exploit people who are desperate, and finding that balance is the challenge for all societies today, IMHO. But this is going off point.)
My objection was to the phrase “lower cost immigrant workers”. Why can it not be simply “lower cost unskilled workers”? Must we have a presumption that immigrants MUST be lower-cost?
Well, I guess I’m going to go off point again, but I’ve re-read Tom’s response to me and something struck me.
How should we understand Tom’s comment that “it’s costless to discriminate against the one you disfavor, because he or she can’t compete by offering to work for less”? I guess I understand the point, but I believe the perception of “cost” is a bit short-sighted. Of course there is an eventual cost to society, isn’t there, in a system where some have to accept less simply to be able to compete? Is such a system really “just”? Is this the best vision of society that libertarianism can offer?
Putting these views out on a libertarian-oriented blog will no doubt generate some criticism, and I’m glad to have my ideas challenged. That’s why I’ve started reading this blog.
That was me on the above comment, BTW.
A little complementary note on this subject, if I may.
Quite rightly mentioned, there is a difference between integration and assimilation. Comparing France and Germany is somewhat difficult. Germany has no substantial colonial past. In the past a German citizen was someone who was born to German parents or who could prove his German ancestry. It changed only with the last Schroeder administration.
The French republicanism -based on the principles of the enlightment- was supposed to garantee equal rights to any individual belonging or wanting to join the French “collective” regardless of his race and religious belief. (oversea territories and former colonies included) The legal dimension of this is reflected in the code de la nationalitÃ?Â??Ã?Â?Ã?© granting citizenship via a combination of not only ius solis but also ius sanguinis. Here the evolution of a -still- very liberal system: http://www.social.gouv.fr/htm/dossiers/nat/histor.htm
Even if Nicolas Sarkozy (born to a Hungarian father btw) has already had some the riotting foreigners expelled, let us remember that the majority involved in these riots are French citizens.
France has a tradition of assimilation. Foreigners literally made France and greatly contributed to its wealth. Incidentally, have a look at the list of French Nobel Prize winners, and see where most of them were born: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prix_Nobel_fran%C3%A7ais
The reason why the French public never took notice of this is that France knows no communautarism, so of course these well deserving people are French and nothing else. It is the less deserving ones who are perceived as non-French and end up perceiving themselves as not belonging to the French collective.
I do not want to engage in a strictly economic discussion of the problem. Because in my opinion, it is neither an economic nor a social problem that has appeared over night. You suggest to give up the concept of assimilation and try the one of economic integration into the community. Fair enough. But it takes two to tango.
On the general issue of violence as a mean of expression: who is in charge of whom here? Generations of foreigners have made it into French society. One of the biggest community in Paris is the Vietnamese one, a postcolonial wave of immigration as well. Ever heard of Vietnamese riotting in the suburbs?
Saying this is social pb is not enough of an answer either. More welfare, more assistance, and loads of understanding won’t get them back on track. It is the contrary that is the case. Aziz Senni has written a very good book on this issue. It has a very funny title: “l’ascenceur social est en panne, j’ai pris l’escalier” http://www.azizsenni.fr//index.php?portrait
The Eastern European community that emigrated to France in the 20ies lived in an incredible poverty. Never, ever did they cause any trouble. Not only this, but statistics show that they made it quite well into the establishment. What does it tell us? Again: who is responsible for whom in the first place if not the parents for their own children- French or not? as simple as that.
I’d like to end on a personal remark: I am myself of foreign descent. I do not want to imagine what would have happened in my family had my uncles started to riot on the streets. The problem would have been solved very quickly, believe me, the Cossack way…
NV
I’m French, and I don’t speak english very well but I want tell that the media is lying ( mentir for people who speak french lol ), The France isn’t burning… and CNN is a stupid chanel of information because the french map is false, and for a chanel of information is inaceptable !! ( in french )
Lukas,
Of course France is not burning. That’s why your parliament just extended the state of emergency for another three years. Hey, we do that all the time in Seattle!
As to CNN: that’s a left of center, mainstream liberal network. If they could cover up what’s going on in France right now, they would. The fact that they don’t -and it took them a few days to realize they couldn’t ignore the rioting any longer- says a lot about the seriousness of the situation.
Correction: three months.
Ah Jake, very true, but do not tell him about Fox news either…NV