Thread: Causes of French riots lurk in United States

http://www.detnews.com/2005/editorial/0 ... 379909.htm

Sunday, November 13, 2005

Causes of French riots lurk in United States

By Thomas Bray / The Detroit News

Americans might be forgiven for experiencing a sense of schadenfreude -- satisfaction in the misery of others -- at the rioting in France. The jihad apparently is coming home to a corrupt French political elite that thought it could appease Muslim extremists by snubbing the United States in Iraq.

America, by contrast, is suffering no such anger in the streets. Around Metro Detroit, home to one of the largest concentrations of ethnic Arabs and Muslims outside the Middle East, all is peaceful, despite strongly held beliefs among community leaders and local imams that U.S. policy in the Middle East is badly misguided.

The reason is clear: Detroit's Arab-American population is a model of economic success, thanks to auto industry employment in the early days and, more recently, capitalizing on its entrepreneurial energy. Americans of Arab descent have a strong stake in society.

In France, by contrast, where unemployment has long hovered in the 10 percent range -- and at least twice that for the Arab population -- despair and anger are rampant.

To this economic disorder has been added a severe moral disorder: an ideology of multiculturalism that is more deeply entrenched in Europe than in America. It invites disaffected communities to dwell on their grievances and reject the common values that allow people of differing backgrounds to work together. The message: Somebody else is responsible for your problems.

Before Americans wax too self-congratulatory, they should remember that similar forces are afoot here. Stubbornly high taxes and job-killing regulations -- including prevailing and "living" wage schemes aimed at preventing willing workers from undercutting union wage levels -- make it difficult to sustain the economic growth that mutes social tensions.

And multiculturalism already is the official ideology among American elites. Virtually every establishment group in Michigan is already opposed to a pending 2006 referendum that would outlaw racial preferences in university admissions and state hiring. Even businessman Dick DeVos, the favorite to be the Republican candidate for governor, rushed to distance himself from the measure.

Affirmative action was invented mainly to help African-Americans after the Jim Crow era. But now that official segregation is long behind us, it's being replaced by the more amorphous goal of "diversity." Almost any group with a grievance is being invited to join the racial spoils game.

Talk about a formula for producing what liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger termed "the disuniting of America."

Just as deadly are the taxes and regulations that suppress job formation -- or drive it underground, where the jobs can only be filled with continuing streams of illegal immigrants, creating a potentially dangerous underclass like that in Europe. Many on the left and right want to deal with this by enacting tough new measures to seal the Southern border and send the estimated 10 million illegal immigrants packing.

But good luck trying to build and effectively patrol a wall along a 2,000-mile border, much less apprehending and expelling millions of Mexicans for accepting underground jobs effectively created by government.

A more cogent immigration policy may be long overdue. But if we don't also learn the right lessons from Europe's experience, we may be doomed to repeat it.

Thomas Bray is a News columnist. Reach him at (313) 222-2544 and tbray@detnews.com.

The reason is clear: Detroit's Arab-American population is a model of economic success, thanks to auto industry employment in the early days and, more recently, capitalizing on its entrepreneurial energy. Americans of Arab descent have a strong stake in society.

I think the writer is over-looking some differences between Detroit and France.

1. The problem in France is a primarily ILLEGAL population of immigrants that came to a country where there were no jobs; no opportunities; no room for them.

2. Detroit presumably incorporated the Arab population that arrived legally in the "early days" when Detroit was booming when there were jobs; opportunities and room for them. I also suspect that as Arabs they brought possessions and some wealth with them. I wonder what Detroit's unemployment rate is now and if a new influx arrived illegally with no possessions and no wealth how well Detroit could handle this?

3. The immigrants that were burning France are African Muslim not Arabs. They did not bring possessions and wealth with them and with no jobs, opportunities or room for them had nothing to work with when they arrived and had families they can not sustain successfully in France.

most up to date info I could find this morning showed Detroit's unemployment rate for feb 2004 at 23.6% nearly double the states unemployment rate of 7.3%

http://www.ci.detroit.mi.us/legislative ... nt%20rate'

GREAT WORK CHARLES!!!

Well, then France's unemployment rate of around 10% is half the City of Detroit's.

So much for their proud "model", eh?

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