Nice recourse to the argument of authority, and to the "everyone is entitled to his opinion" argument.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman

First, "immigrants".. this means coming from another place....they are foreigners ..not like us.. the fact that most rioters were french makes it difficult to defend...but if someone does not want to change the conclusion  because he has already a good idea in mind before the real data is received h ehas to forget it...what's that idea? well you get the key in "ungrateful".... they are foreigners .. they come to our "home" .. so they should be grateful to "us". "We" allow them to be here..

IN two words you have constructed a world of "us" versus "them" and where "them" should behave according to my rules...Even better, if you associate anyone that breaks the law with an inmigrant no mattter if he is an immigrant or not, then you have a more wonderful circle reasoning...now they really break our common rules.. they break the law..they are inmigrants because they break the law and they look to me as inmigrants. And why te break the law? beacuase they are inmigrants.

Of course, if it turns out that they are not inmigrants but French then it is a little problematic...So, next step is trying to say that someone is an "inmigrant" witout really "being an inmigrant".. well what about some weird surname or a weird colour of the skin... that will clearly make the difference..Let's say colour of the skin.

So basically "ungrateful inmigrants" has a slight touch of describing a world that does not exist but can be easily created about people from another race...It basically concludes that it is better to forget that the rioters have been living in France since they were born..that they all have very different races and backgrounds (except that all of them were poor), they are actually French...and their reason for rioting is rather complex...."inmigrant" and ungrateful" are easier to understand..but the narrative below is.. divisive (I do not want to use the harsh word)

So I would not agree with your description. And I really hope that one day you will see that he/she  (your professor) is wrong...there are  a lot of great threads about this topic hee in ET..I am sure you will love to read them..it may change your opinion...maybe not.. but at least you will understand why other people may not think like you.

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

I really do not know exactly the "reason" or the feeling or the mood with which you made your comment.
I assumed a lot of thing I should have not assumed in my answer.

Migeru made me realize that maybe you were absolutely serious ...then my long post is not appropriate. I really strongly disagree with your comment but deconstructing it in such a detail/humorous way was not appropriate.

I should direct you the multiple thread about this topic here in ET.

I certainly apologize and you indeed can (must?) troll-rate the other comment...

In case you really wanted the kind of answer I gave you, then forget this post.

I should have asked before...sorry in any case.

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

Some points on this:

The motivation was not religious, not a single car-burner talking on TV (and the mummed car-burners' willingness to talk to the media was another interesting angle) mentioned anything religion, in fact it was even denounced by French Muslims (as well as the majority of even the inhabitants of the cités in polls). This had more to do with the French tradition of social unrest. Or, a more focused one: culturally the car-burners had much more to do with local hip-hop culture. (You could say, what Eminem is only preaching about in as video clip, they did in practice.) Indeed our French or France-based expat readers confirmed that faces shown on TV were often white, e.g. no children of immigrants just of poor people in the cités.

A further point is that 'riot' may not be the right word for what happened. There were very few clashes with police - most of it was arson attacks, mostly against cars, you can't compare this to, say, the Rodney King riot in LA with 53 dead - or even football hooligan riots.

Furthermore, there is the issue of media attention. This was not a wave of arson attacks, but an uptick in arson attacks noticed by the media. A hundred cars were burnt every day even before it in France - and even more in Britain!

Another point our French readers stressed is in the prehistory of the conflict between the youth of the poor banlieues and the police. One of the measures of the previous leftist government to improve the situation there was to establish a 'neighbourhood police', i.e. policemen who know the communities they patrol in. But in the new right-wing government that came to power 2002, tough-guy Sarkozy dissolved these - and brought in outsiders into the cités, from a police branch known for its harshness, who then proceeded with aggressive identity checks (which were also quite racist in whom to pick), 'pre-emptive arrests' and such, all the while nothing was done to ease the job-seeking problems that are more severe for marginalised people in France than elsewhere.

A final point is that of the final reaction of the government: it wasn't just the allovance of declaring emergency situation and curfews, but the PM choose to make wide-sweeping promises on how to ease the job- , police- and education-related problems.

Last, some of the dozens of threads we had back then, and one more recent:
Paris riots
Paris 'riots': My aunt's building burned yesterday night
Unemployment rates of immigrants/non-immigrants, sensitive suburbs vs rest of France
Crisis of French society - and the left
Paris now nothing but cinders and ashes. [<-satirical entry]
Why the French Riots Were a Good Thing

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}