November 7, 2005
THE NUB
The fiery rage of immigrant alienation (Susan Sachs, Globe and Mail, November 7th, 2005)
The growing wave of rioting and arson that has been sweeping across France for the past 11 nights, sowing fear and anger in low-income and immigrant-heavy cities, has created a political and social crisis that defies easy explanation.Right-wing commentators and politicians have blamed defiantly unassimilated immigrants from Arab and African countries for the violence. On the left, the accusations are equally virulent, pinning the explosion on cutbacks in social programs and persistent unemployment that have driven France's have-nots into open rebellion.
But in the cités, as the low-income apartment towers are known in French, residents offer another explanation: an ingrained intolerance for diversity that they say has created a permanent underclass.
"If your name is Ali or Mohammed or some other non-Western name," said Mr. Guizani, a product of the projects like those in Aulnay-sous-Bois, "you are assumed to be not French. People don't feel they are part of France, and yet they don't belong anywhere else."[...]
Hassen Farsadou, head of the Union of Muslim Associations in nearby Rosny-sous-Bois, said he has spent the past week trying to persuade seemingly angry young people not to burn and loot their neighbourhoods.
"When I asked them why they would want to go out and make trouble, they talk about the incident of the tear gas at the mosque," he said. "They said that makes them enraged."
No matter that the same boys rarely, if ever, set foot in a mosque or demonstrated any interest in religion. "They saw it on TV, they got worked up about it and they stirred up other boys," Mr. Farsadou said. They wanted attention, he added. They were thrilled to have their town shown on TV. Still, one of France's largest Islamic groups saw fit yesterday to issue a fatwa against rioting.
In discussions with French political leaders in recent days, some of the young ghetto-dwellers have said they want decent jobs, decent housing and an equal chance at social mobility.
The root problem, said Mr. Guizani, is that the residents feel estranged from a society that treats them as outsiders and discriminates against them in the workplace and in schools.
"They feel that they're always going to be considered immigrants, even when they have been born in France and are French citizens," he said. "It makes them uneasy in their spirits and their heads."
Perhaps it is best not to get too hung up on words like multiculturalism and assimilation and focus instead on the hard daily realities of the immigrant experience. The world’s three most successful immigrant societies–The United States, Australia and Canada-- preach different ideals but arrive pretty much at the same place in the end. Americans hold fast to the ideal of the melting pot and unquestioned fidelity to the constitution, yet are extremely tolerant and even encouraging of cultural and religious retention. For decades, Canada and Australia have pursued official multiculturalist policies that read right from the tranzi playbook, yet there is little separation of cultures and communities beyond the first generation. Both invest huge resources in what is really assimilation by another name and, when tempted by a wacky or even dangerous political correctness, are often set right by their immigrants themselves.
In Europe, not even the rigorous enforcement of a sterile and uncompromising anti-cultural secularism based upon abstract notions of universal brotherhood and equality has tempered their atavistic hatred and distancing of the other. Behind all the officialese lie thousands of daily insults and degradations that would make even the most nativist North American squirm. Recently in Greece, Albanian immigrants were (officially) denied tickets to a Greece-Albania soccer match for “security reasons”. In France and Belgium, African immigrants are often spoken to publically like wayward servants and nobody protests. A fourth generation Turkish-German is still a Turk and who can imagine a modern American presidential election being fought over the menace to the nation posed by Polish plumbers?
Immigration can be a messy business and is never an unbroken string of success stories. Questions of security and loyalty do arise sometimes (German-American Bund, Fenians, East European communists, etc.) and the crime and squalor that can attend large-scale first generation immigration are charming only in nostalgic films and novels. Yet there has never been an ethnic, racial or religious group that did not successfully assimilate to and enrich the three countries and prove fiercely loyal by the second generation.
Whatever socio-economic differences one may struggle to find between European and Anglospheric immigrants themselves, the key distinction is in the collective cultural commitment made to them. Loyalty and work is all that is asked and in return they are embraced wholeheartedly as equals soon after they arrive. America’s refusal to turn on its Muslim-Americans after 9/11, Canada’s choice of a Haitian immigrant as Head of State and Australia’s rough-hewed, defiantly anti-snobbish egalitarianism all bespeak an uncommonly welcoming decency that transcends and even defeats the pronouncements of politicians and policy wonks. It is that welcoming decency that captures the spirit and loyalty of the immigrant, whose heart soars with gratitude and resolve at the knowledge his children will not bear that label and at the realization he and his family have won the lottery of life.
Posted by Peter Burnet at November 7, 2005 6:47 AMIsn't it pretty obvious that the difference is the welfare state. We aren't one. Immigrants, legal or illegal, need to work and if they're ambitious, hard working and talented, they can go right up the economic ladder and their children can reach up into the highest levels of our society. That's very unlikely anywhere else on earth.
The UK and Australia, while nearer to a welfare state than we are, are no where near the levels of Euroland.
I don't disagree with any of this, but an important part of all this is illustrated by perhaps the most successful nation of immigrants of the 20th century -- Israel. It's nice to have a widely accepted unifying theme that is a matter of life and death to the population. Cohesion comes from fighting a common enemy together.
As for France, it is sad, but then why do I feel like laughing?
Posted by: David Cohen at November 7, 2005 8:17 AMAs did cohesion come fighting the lobsterbacks in 1814-15 in NOLA.
And remembering the Alamo.
There's more at work in the anglosphere's immigration successes than a market economy, although having to work (and having jobs available) are important.
Another factor is culture. Britain by the 17th century was already multi-ethnic -- as my Welsh ancestors and my Scots would be quick to remind you. You only have to read Shakespeare to be reminded that ethnic clashes occurred openly in the form of battles and covertly in the form of political control for a long time in Britain before the rise of literacy, trade, Parliament and the common threat of France melded the country into a more or less whole.
That, plus the common law tradition that keeps power dispersed in most cases, makes assimilating another ethnic group relatively easy in comparison to the statist Republic which is overtly hostile to different languages, cultures and identities.
Posted by: too true at November 7, 2005 8:55 AMOne thing all three contries also share in relation to immigrants is a failure (so far) to create some type of identity politics for that group, which ends up having those people treated merely as group members and not individuals, with their own thoughts, goals and personalities. Part of that is because religious identity does not depend on race, in the same way Democrats have used identity and racial politics to define blacks in America for the past 40 years. Blacks really are the only group today with so-called "spokesmen" like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, who are trotted out any time the media or liberal politicans want to engage in group-think for blacks.
James Zogby or the folks at C.A.I.R. might want to be the leaders of the Muslims in America, but like Hispanics, the group is too diverse for the big media outlets and politicians to pigeonhole into a group of one-size-fits-all beliefs that can be represented by a few self-appointed leaders. For all its liberalism, Canada as of now shares the same advantage, though the talk last year about allowing Canadian Muslims to set up their own legal system based on the Koran would be the first step down the road towards what's happening in France right now.
Posted by: John at November 7, 2005 9:05 AMThe difference is that in large-scale immigrant countries, the definition of commonality is not whether one had the same grandparents, but whether one will have the same grandchildren. That is not so in ethnic states like in Europe.
Incidentally, Israel is also an ethnic state which is why it has not assimilated the Palestinians within its territories. This is not to say that the Palestinians also do not think of themselves as such, but it's weird to define Israel as a successful assimilationist immigrant nation when all its immigrants are already Jews.
Racial identity politics only comes about when members of said race are habitually discriminated against. If whites hadn't screwed the blacks over, there wouldn't be any more identity politics among blacks as there are among Irish, Poles, Italians, or Greeks. We reap what we sow.
Posted by: Chris Durnell at November 7, 2005 11:31 AMDavid, I buy your comment about unifying principles, although I'm not sure how sui generisIsrael can be viewed as an inspiration for anybody else. But in the terms that I think you mean, you'd be hard-pressed to put your finger on them in Australia and Canada--Sergeant Preston and Crocodile Dundee? The unifying principles are merit, self-reliance, civility to all and political and especially economic freedom (ever try and start a business in Europe?), principles that I believe the majority of immigrants actually reinforce themselves because they know better than the native-born how fragile they can be and what their absence could mean. But the ideological lead on these will continue to come from the States with the others taking periodic time-outs to dwell on their insular distinctiveness and fool around with this or that social experiment. There's nothing wrong or unnatural about that (they are both patriotic places with histories of being chippy about being taken for granted)provided they don't lose sight of who is carrying the ball on the big stuff, something Australia understands much better than we these days.
Another key factor is the speed of acceptance and assimilation. Immigrants come from far and wide with no particular affinity for one another. By the time the left has caught their attention with tempting notions of "institutional" racism and cultural activism, mom and dad have made head surgeon or bought the second fast-food franchise and the kid is on scholarship.
Posted by: Peter B at November 7, 2005 12:47 PM"yet there is little separation of cultures and communities beyond the first generation."
Say whaa....!?!?
I think you mean Sweden(tho I don't personally regard gang rape as "inclusive"),but you've already penciled them in for extinction,so why bring it up?
"If whites hadn't screwed the blacks over, there wouldn't be any more identity politics among blacks"
And now that they're the most legally privileged and heavily subsidized group in the country,would you care to set a date identity politics will have whithered away?
"there wouldn't be any more identity politics among blacks as there are among Irish, Poles, Italians, or Greeks"
Convince Mario Coumo he's not part of an ethinic idenity group and I'll consider it(bring earplugs and a lunch).
Posted by: fghj at November 7, 2005 12:48 PM