France has large numbers of people descended from assimilated immigrants. The unassimilated immigrants in France are Arabic-speaking Muslims, and Arabic-speaking Muslims alone. If France were to boot out the Arab Muslims, as most French wish, assimilation of immigrants would cease to be a problem.

Many of the Muslims in France aren't immigrants, so they can't be "booted out." They're native born Algerian-Frenchmen because not too long ago Algeria was a part of France.

The melting pot works which is why the left is doing its best to reverse that process and put us all into separate little ethnic enclaves and calling it diversity and multiculturism.

The Republican party should make assimilation an important part of its agenda and English should be declared is the official language of the United States. I'm getting very tired of being told which button to press for English when calling a utility or a retail outlet and I let the operator know of my displeasure.

If you don't want to learn English, then it's up to you to get somebody to interpret for you. In the end, all immigrants will be better off for it. Right now there are many U.S. born citizens who have lived in the U.S. all their lives but who cannot speak unaccented English. This second class citizen status is a disgrace that has been aided and abetted by the counter-productive bi-lingual programs in our public schools.

erp,

Don't make the assumption that France has the same view of citizenship as America, very few nations do.

The fact that they were born in France is pretty much irrelevant. The fact that Jews have been in France for 2500 years, predating the ancient Roman presence didn't keep numerous French monarchs from booting us out nor did it keep the French from turning Jews into the Germans in the Occupied Zone during WWII. French Protestants, many of whom are from the Gallic heartland of the Massif Central, were booted out during the 16th-18th centuries. Paul Revere is an example.

The decision of private enterprise to communicate in something other English is really not a matter for the law. If I ask my local Korean grocer where the green peppers are and he stares at me and starts yelling unintelligibly, I simply take my business elsewhere. He has the right to choose to target a narrow ethnic audience to the exclusion of other potential customers, however stupid that may be. Government publications, OTOH, should be in English and English only, with the sole exception that criminal defendants should be entitled to interpreters, so as to have a fair trial.

yes, so much for the assimilation of non-Arabs you imagine.

erp:

"Right now there are many US born citizens who have lived in the US all their lives but who cannot speak unaccented English".

"Many"? It's the whole lot of you.

"One assumes George Soros has cornered the Zyklon B concession."

Obligatory Nazi reference for the day?

kapo

"It is not only Israel that Mr. Soros abjures but Jewish charities in general, an attitude he attributes to his observations of the Judenrat, or Jewish council, that the Nazis created in Budapest, for which he worked as a courier, and by a rather weird experience with the Jewish Board of Guardians during his years in London. If blaming Jewish organizations--or Israel--for the works of the Nazis is hard to fathom, his attitude toward the Board of Guardians is no more explicable. It seems he appealed to it for financial support after breaking a leg, but the board arranged instead for him to receive a British government stipend. When he wrote an aggrieved letter deploring this as a tawdry way for 'one Jew [to] treat . . . another in need,' the board backed down and provided him with a cash allowance for the duration of his recovery. Later, he would confess insouciantly to his biographer the reason he had been so angry: He had already arranged to receive the government payment and had hidden this fact from the board in the hope of receiving duplicate benefits. It was, he said, 'a double-dip,' and one that 'solved all my financial problems.'

"More remarkable still in this connection is Mr. Soros's frequent comment that 1944 was 'the best year of my life.' It is easy to see how a boy of 14 might have been 'excited' by the 'adventure' of evading the Nazis with an assumed identity, as he says he was. But 70% of Mr. Soros's fellow Jews in Hungary, nearly a half-million human beings, were annihilated in that year. They were dying and disappearing all around him, and their numbers no doubt included many whom he knew personally. Yet he gives no sign that this put any damper on his elation, either at the time or indeed in retrospect."

--Joshua Muravchik, "The Mind of George Soros," Wall Street Journal (March 3, 2004).

OJ,

Which of course explains the elevation of Gambetta, Mendes-France, Ferry, Fabius, Meyer, Blum, Balladur, Beregovoy, Couve de Murville and Jospin et al to the Prime Ministership, none of whom were French Catholics. Nor the fact that the current expected replacement for Chirac is the Catholic son of Hungarian Jewish refugees, Nicolas Sarkozy.

If you choose to assimilate, France will welcome you. The debates have been over precisely what is meant by assimilation. The secularization of France, especially since WWII, has meant the end to the requirement that Catholicism is part of the French definition. Not even LePen will publicly take that position today. The problem with Muslim Arabs in France is quite simple, they refuse to speak French, behave like Frenchmen, or even follow French laws. It is unique in the annals of French history, and France's traditional openness to immigrants is being seriously debated for the first time in national history.

a handful of exceptions counters the thousands fed into the ovens? You come cheap.

oj,

Those are just Prime Ministers. France is full of families of non-French Catholic origin and practice who are at the effective top of the economic and social food chain. Many of my relatives and friends are proof of that.

You want to ascribe all manner of evil to the French, fine. Just at least try to have some fleeting familiarity with facts when you do. The peculiar reality is that France is in many ways a kind of funhouse mirror reflection of America, in many ways different, but in many ways the most American of European nations.

France is the opposite of America, within the limited context of the West. The only conflict that has ever mattered and been losable was within the West between the French and the Anglos. We prevailed.

An opinion of course not shared by Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin.

The revolutionary French ideal is different from, but far from opposite of, the American. Most French Third Republic governments and their policies would seem remarkably similar to American ones of a similar period. What happened in France was the growth of a socialist movement and the presence of a religious institution which wanted to bring back the worst of feudalism. America avoided both extremes.

France has been in perpetual decline since it adopted secular egalitarianism as its central organizing principle in the Revolution, in contrast to the Judeo-Christian liberty of the Anglo-American revolutions.

It didn't have the benefit of a large Pietistic Protestant population to compel them to do that. It was either the ultramontane feudal nonsense of the 18th century Catholic Church or it was official atheism.

Catholicism was working fine--they made the worst choice.

I guess it was working fine if you approve of the notion of keeping the vast majority of the population poor, ignorant and exploited, as well as denying any civil rights to members of religious minorities. Catholicism worked great for the nobles and the clergy, not so good for the remaining 95+% of the country.

It was a great and growing nation. It became a small and declining one.

By 14eme Juillet, 1789, France was in decline, it was bankrupt, defeated, it had no military projection capacity and its economy was well behind that of Britain. France was the dominant power in Europe in the late 19th century, it was the leading financial, scientific, intellectual and diplomatic power as well. That is why educated gentlemen from Tokyo to Toledo were required to be fluent in French at that time.

French decline has to do with socialism not with the end of the power of the Church. It was the end of the Church's power that allowed for the expansion of the French economy and intellectual establishment in the years after public education became universal.

Its ideas all proved wrong and those of England circa 1776 right. It spent the 19th and 20th century losing wars to all comers.

Maybe so. But had they continued with Bourbon absolutism it would be no more than Spain today. And please don't insult people's intelligence by equating the two or making some hare-brained argument that Spain is somehow getting better or advancing, and that it is somehow related to its Catholicism which is just as moribund as the French if not more. It just won't work.

Spain did better than the rest of Europe during the 50s and 60s and was cranking under the Anglophile Aznar [http://hir.harvard.edu/articles/890/].

There was no Bourbon absolutism and power sharing would have evolved along the same lines as in Britain, making France viable. Instead the chose a different model that is a spectacular failure.

'There was no Bourbon absolutism..'

Just by saying that, you have proved the uselessness of continuing the conversation. The very word 'absolutisme' is a 17th century French neo-logism used to describe the rule of Louis XIV. France had no Magna Carta, no effective band of nobles jealous of their rights willing and able to fight the King. That ended with the Fronde.

Spain was on its ass in the 1950s, did better than it had been doing by the 60s. The real economic growth came after Franco's death. Aznar was doing comparatively well but an economy with 16-18% chronic unemployment can hardly be called 'cranking.'

bart:

Yes, and the mionarchy had almost no effect on day to day life. Absolutism was a paltry thing.

I recently read a book that considers much of contemporary France's problems the reaction to the extreme ecclesiastical power extending at least through the 1600s.

Bart is correct.

Jeff:

Exactly. The failure of the French model lies in its reaction to faith.

No, the failure was in the primary cause: extreme ecclesiastical power.

Where the power was less extreme, the reaction was correspondingly less.

It is a cause and effect thing.

So we now have a France that had both an absolutist monarchy and an absolutist Church, even though the two are mutually exclusive. The only thing you guys are right about is that the secular Rationalist reaction--which trampled Church and Crown--was extremist. Thus what was a great nation has been destroyed.

OJ: Read the history of ecclesiastical power in France.

That, and justify why monarchy and ecclesiastical power are mutually exclusive.

They sure weren't in Spain.

The Church in France was a counterweight to the King, one of many. the absolutism you guys imagine was rather limited, especially by comparison to the modern state.

The French people saw the Church as partnered with the King and the nobles in a conspiracy to rip them off. Its behavior during the last Estates-General only reinforced this universally held view.

bart:

Yes, the French people are idiots.

No. It seems their grasp for the readily apparent is more keen than yours.