Skip to main content

A Comment

I have received the comment below from my previous post on the subject of the recent riots in France:
Zefrog,
I enjoyed your article, but it seems to me that there may be an additional problem here,open borders, that is shared by many other countries as well.
Perhaps there are many Frenchmen who do not want "Cheap" labor flooding the country and vying for the same jobs they themselves need. When you add to this the tendency of many of these people to not want to assimilate it creates resentment.In addition,because of the high birth rate of many of these immigrants, and the lower birth rate of the French, it is estimated that France will lose it's national identity in forty years. Personally, I feel if a person does not want to become "French", but instead retain his own ethnic identity, perhaps he should remain in his own country and work to make it better rather than immigrate to another mans country and expect them to accommodate his customs.
I am very sorry to have to say this to a new visitor to my blog and someone who took the trouble to leave of comment, of which I am grateful, but this opinion shows nothing more than a complete lack of knowledge of the current situation in France.

The problem has very little to do with immigration, not the immigration allowed by the Schengen treaty, which is refered to in the above. If immigration has to be included in this equation, one has to go back to 1950's during Les Trente Glorieuses, a period of incredible econimic growth during which France had to resort to a workforce recruited mostly in what was left of its dwindling colonial empire. There was also a strong migratory flow coming from Poland, Italy and Portugual the same time. The country was more than happy of this extra workforce feeding its economic growth. The people forming this wave of immigration on the whole integrated quite nicely. There were after all not economical insecurity to creat social tensions. It is probably fair to say however that the european immigrant probably integrated better than the mostly north african ones. I do not think however that this is due to an unwillingness on the part of these poeple as is suggested in the comment but simply because the cultural differences were far greater and the gap more difficult to bridge.

In any case the people rioting today in the street of France are not immigrants. They are French people, born in France. The third and fourth generations sons and daughters of the 1950's immigrants. Far from expecting other French people "to accommodate [their] customs", the lifestyle of these young men (I assume here, perhaps wrongly, that there are few women involved in the riots) is as european as can be and probably bears very little resemblance to the one their forefathers left behind them when they were invited to France. The problem, as I have stated before does not stem from an unwillingness to integrated but from the fact that, although most of them are citizens of the country, they are still made to feel like foreigners because of their origin. When someone feels rejected, their first instinct is to reject even further in return.

Finally, I am not sure what relevance to I can attach to the demographic argument developped in the comment. It seems to me to be pure and simple xenophobia, which, I think at the root of the crisis. If I understand my reader's position and if it is shared in France as he assumes it is, then surely the rioters should not be the descendant of immigrants who are currently rioting but rather those evanescent and hypothetical "true French" who fear that demoraphic invasion or those "many Frenchmen who do not want "Cheap" labor flooding the country and vying for the same jobs they themselves need". All of them happily forgetting in the process that France had always been a terre d'asile which stemmed from and continuously strived on foreign influences.


Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

Comments

  1. We in the United Kingdom are all very grateful for your cheap labour, Zefrog.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I found your blog surfing.

    Your analysis of the situation on Paris streets, makes sense. It has nothing to do with Iraq, al Qaeda, Iraq, Afghanistan, immigration, or George Bush.

    Regards.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "It has nothing to do with Iraq, al Qaeda, [...] or George Bush for the very simple reason that the French government opposed the war in Iraq.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Please leave your comment here. Note that comments are moderated and only those in French or in English will be published. Thank you for taking the time to read this blog and to leave a thought.

Popular posts from this blog

A Short History of the Elephant and Castle and Its Name

Last night I attended a lecture by local historian Stephen Humphrey who discussed the general history of the Elephant & Castle, focussing more particularly on what he called its heyday (between 1850 and 1940). This is part of a week-long art project ( The Elephant Project ) hosted in an empty unit on the first floor of the infamous shopping centre, aiming to chart some of the changes currently happening to the area. When an historian starts talking about the Elephant and Castle, there is one subject he can not possibly avoid, even if he wanted to. Indeed my unsuspecting announcement on Facebook that I was attending such talk prompted a few people to ask the dreaded question: Where does the name of the area come from, for realz? Panoramic view of the Elephant and Castle around 1960/61. Those of us less badly informed than the rest have long discarded the theory that the name comes from the linguistic deformation of "Infanta de Castille", a name which would have become at

Rev. Peter Mullen's Blog

Rev. Peter Mullen is the chaplain to the London Stock Exchange and the rector of St Michael's Cornhill and St Sepulchre without Newgate in the City. Rev. Peter Mullen was also until recently a blogger. Sadly the result of his cyber labour seem to have been deleted but Google has thankfully cached some of it and I have saved a copy for posterity, just in case. The deletion of Rev. Mullen's writings might just have something to do with the fact that last week, the Evening Standard and then the Daily Mail published an article (the same article actually) about some of those very writings (even though the elements of said writings being quoted had been published in June this year, at the time of the blessing ceremony which took place between two members of the Church of England in St Bartholomew the Great - picture ). In the article, we learned what the Rev. thinks about gay people and what should be done to them: We ["Religious believers"] disapprove of homosexuality

Liam Messam and Tamati Ellison Swap Jerseys

I am having a bit of a vacuous evening looking at images of pretty rugby players. Addidas, with its latest viral campaign, Jersey Swap , seems to be squarely aiming at the gay market with a selection of five antipodean rugby players, visitor to the website can select and see take their tops off and... well... swap jersey (those interested can create posters too). My favorites of the bunch are Liam Messam and Tamati Ellison . The pictures of their pretty faces and bulging naked torsos (excuse me while I sit down for a second!) included to this post should tell you why. A job well done for Addidas. This will go round the Internet for a while, I think.