I gave both of you hints about what I see as pragmatic policies: helping the immigrants, but also considering the locals, the cultural differences, enforcing integration and republican values (in France) along with help for integration and against discrimination.

That's not policies, that's slogans. How do you think the immigrants should be helped (and helped to do what?)? How do you think the locals should be "considered?" What does "cultural differences" mean when translated into English, and how does one "consider" it when designing policy? How does one "enforce" "republican values?" And what are those "republican values" in the first place? How do you think that public policy can best assist integration (of whom into what?), and how can public policy be used to prune back discrimination?

Also accepting in France people with a good chance to adapt

What does this even mean? You do realise that there are several ways to get into France that France has very little control over? Refugees cannot be cherry-picked like that - aside from the dubious morality of doing so, it's probably in violation of the UN Refugee Convention. Then there's the whole marriage thing - where a policy of making immigration by marriage difficult by making potential immigrants jump through a ridiculous number of insane hoops is not only of dubious legality under both UN and Union law - it also effectively exiles those of your own citizens who happen to be unfortunate enough to fall in love with someone from outside the Union.

balanced, rational measures that have worked in countries like Canada or Australia.

But you haven't actually mentioned any of those measures! All you've done is provide a laundry list of slogans. Australia and Canada have taken a lot of measures over the years that could broadly be said to be based on those slogans - some of them more or less rational and balanced, while others... not so much.

Vulnerable people must be protected and helped, but not by introducing other kinds of unfairness or exclusion. Hence, I don't believe in quota laws, except very rare, precise cases and very limited in time.

OK, this is more like it. There's actually a debatable political principle here. So quotas are bad and need to be thoroughly justified and limited in scope and time. I can buy that (for suitable values of "limited" and "thoroughly justified").

But can you actually give any examples of quotas that have been assigned on ideological rather than factual grounds?

I think both Massachusets vote for and California vote against gay marriage should be accepted as democratical, contested democratically, without throwing insults and contempt at the other.

Reducing a group of people to second-class citizens based on nothing more than their sexual preference is a completely kosher expression of democracy? I disagree, but at least that proposition is sufficiently concrete to be subject to be debated on its merits.

But I do wonder: When those amendments are struck down by the SCOTUS as being in violation of the Federal constitution, will you argue that this should also be accepted as a kosher expression of democracy? Or is a plebiscite "more democratic" than the doctrine of judicial review?

we should not legislate for every possible situation,

Straw man.

we should not attempt to protect people at all cost,

From what? And, as an aside, "at all cost" is a straw man too.

we cannot justify issues only by societal or environmental causes.

Environmental as in the culture you grow up in or environmental as in polar bears?

I think the idea that people are completely irresponsible is wrong,

But surely, you do accept that some people are totally and utterly irresponsible, right? And policies must be enacted to curtail their irresponsible behaviour, correct? I think that's pretty obvious - particularly set against the backdrop of a global economy brought to the ragged edges of another great depression by one of the greatest pyramid scams in history...

just as the idea that crime or poverty would only be explained by external causes.

Here's my suggestion for the question of crime and poverty: We know that poverty causes crime. We don't know how much of the current crime is caused by poverty, and how much is caused by other factors. But we do know that inasmuch as there is poverty, some of the crime is caused by poverty. So I'd suggest getting rid of the poverty. Then there will be less crime, and we will probably have a clearer picture of what causes the crime, since we've eliminated one of the contributions.

I'd call that a pragmatic approach.

As for the causes of poverty... pragmatically, they don't matter much, because poverty can largely be cured with distributionary policies. There may be ideological reasons to prefer other methods as far as possible (empowerment is also a part of lefty ideology, after all) but pragmatically money works exceedingly well to combat poverty...

Laws should not be made from principial reasons, but depending on the concrete case,

Kinda sorta... But taken to excess, this leads to a lex 8 o'clock news syndrome - where each whiff of scandal gives rise to a new law or rule or regulation to prevent similar failings in the future. Such ad hoc laws often create an ineffective and unduly burdensome legal hodge-podge, which lacks both coherence, structure and a clear strategy for what it is supposed to accomplish.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

Jake has gotten into depth to important questions but I will restrict my reply to two issues:

ValentinD:

This led me to say that the dutch policies you mentioned were not so much pragmatic but debatable compromises made on a social-libertarian foundation.

So you did, but with little evidence to show for your argument. Again, I don't think you've adequately answered why libertarian rational can never be considered as pragmatic.

The other problem I remain having is also pointed out by Jake - your ideas on pragmatism get obfuscated by a slew of generalities. I don't "get" your side of pragmatism - the word just gets bandied around and it's just a filler word for me. Drop the hints, tell us what you really would like to see happening.

And preferably not in this thread.