Where I disagree is when you say that the French model has failed. I am still not convinced that it is true. All the INSEE studies show that the vast majority of immigrants and their (French children) integrate reasonably well and are no worse off than other French people of similar background.
It is short termism (our society's disease) to expect results in years and not in generations. I'll go and collect all the things that were said and written about Italians and Poles in France a few decades ago. it was the same stuff: "they are different" "they bring their religion with them and want to impose it on our country" "they don't want to integrate and stay together", etc.... In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
Ben P
As to Poles and Italians - the way I see it the problem of Arab and Black immigrants is both the standard one of immigrant groups and one of race. France has generally been quite successful at assimilating white immigrants, particularly Catholic ones. The only racial minority that France had before the postwar period was the Jews and there both assimilation and racism were at much higher levels than with today's racial minorities. Then came WWII which, to quote Celine's regretful quip, 'ruined antisemitism,' making the rather substantial postwar Jewish immigration a mostly non-racial issue.
To be fair America's success is only a relative one and doesn't really apply to the socio-economic bottom half. There the combination of still existing racism and America's poor government services have had dismal results. But wr/t the top half I do not think that one can dismiss France's problems by saying that time will solve things. France's Arab immigration is no more recent than that of Hispanics in the US, and blacks lived under a ruthless apartheid regime until the sixties. But neither on a political nor on an economic level do you see the sort of representation at higher levels of society that exists in the US.
PS One ethnic group that has not done well in reaching the top in the US are the Poles, and those who have are overwhelmingly drawn from the (well educated) minority that came in the last half century.
People seem to forget that France has been a country of immigration - not only emigration like most of the rest of Europe - for centuries, and HAS integrated pretty much everybody.
My experience of living and working in central Paris, which is worth what it is worth (I work near the Grands Magasins, so it's a shopping and touristy district as well as a white collar business district, and you have lots of different jobs, not all of them high wage), is that you have innumerable people of Arab origins living and working in the same kind of jobs that other French people. One of our newest recruits in our team is a young guy of Algerian origins who went through HEC (the top business school) - and the next person to join our team will be a Bengali immigrant.
But nobody talks about the 80-90% (especially the women) that are successfully integrated and lead normal lifes, even if they live in a banlieue, most of which are pleasant areas.
Again, I am not denying the problems, but also trying to put them in perspective. If you buy the "France is in decline, its society is fucked up, it needs to reform" spiel, which I don't (at least not in the terms put in the business and/or English speaking press), then it's easy to see these riots as an overriding problem. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
