Riots strike deep at a French ideal

PARIS - Last year, a French sociologist answered 258 help-wanted ads for salespeople by sending nearly 2,000 fictitious resumes with identical qualifications, and photos attached, as is the custom here.

Faring poorly, among others, were members of France's most disadvantaged minority group - Arab Muslims.

White males with French names received an invitation to interview at a rate of 30 percent, compared with just 5 percent for people with Arab names.

In the United States, such findings might be met with a renewed commitment to affirmative action and vows by the government to continue prosecuting illegal hiring discrimination. But in France, where rioting by mostly Muslim youths has wracked the country for the last 12 days, affirmative action is illegal, and the country's job-discrimination law, enacted in 2001, is rarely enforced.

In a republic where it is proudly enshrined that every citizen is equal under the law, experts say many people are in denial about the reality that they are not equal.

"Everybody knows discrimination exists, but people couldn't imagine the level of it," said the sociologist, Jean-Francois Amadieu, a professor at the University of Paris who undertook the study along with a French employment agency.

It is too soon to tell how dramatically the continuing violence and vandalism will shake France's approach to race, religion and social integration, a policy that refuses to acknowledge the social consequences of ethnic differences so as not to compromise the French ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity.

But the debate is in full throttle, with Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy - whose tough comments have provoked the rioters, some say - stating flatly this week that "the French model for integration has failed."

He was referring to the idea that any immigrant who comes to live in France becomes "French," a designation supposed to connote not a Gallic identity, but "an ideal of citizenship which has no ethnic background," said Catherine de Wenden, a migration expert at the Center for International Studies and Research in Paris.

The model worked well enough when the immigrants were Italians or Spaniards. But it crumbled under the pressure of the entry of millions of Muslims from France's former North African colonies, who came from starkly different cultural traditions.

That is hardly news to the teenagers in the down-at-the-heels Parisian suburbs, where the riots started Oct. 27 after two teens were electrocuted while apparently hiding from police.

They live in a world apart - a milieu of unemployment, crime, substandard education, and frequent run-ins with police. It is a world with its own slang and its own dress code, the baggy-jeans look that began in American inner cities. The idea that racial discrimination in French society would surprise anyone is laughable to them.

Teens have been burning cars and scraping with police for years here, but the events of recent days have taken on political overtones. Asked what the riots were about, Jamel Karinal, 34, answered: "The message is this: We have no work. We look for jobs, we knock on doors, but no one hires us."

Karinal spoke in a new, low-rise public-housing development in Aulnay-sous-Bois. Many residents are living on public assistance of $600 per family member per month and paying a subsidized monthly rent of $300.

But even the most generous public aid cannot make them feel connected to society or grant the jobless the dignity that comes with employment.

"Yes, I'm French but rejected by the French themselves," said a 17-year-old Muslim whose parents immigrated from the African state of Mali, who would give only her first name, Keisy.

The residents of these suburban ghettos are often the children or grandchildren of North African Arabs who came to France as guest workers in the 1960s and never left. They do not share the values of their Arabic-speaking, often ill-educated parents, but neither have they been welcomed into mainstream French culture. Some are dark-skinned, and others could pass as white European, a fact that matters little when they give an Arab-sounding name.

Not only are they underrepresented in politics, the corporate world, and the media, but they have also struggled to win jobs in the very police force that is a daily presence in their lives.

A government report last year - a rare attempt at race-conscious measurement - showed that fewer than 1 percent of France's 1,800 police chiefs were of immigrant background and that just 3 percent of officers in the elite national riot police were of North African descent.

"The riots are not only the responsibility of the police and the politicians," said Nabil Chahboun, 27, president of the Bordeaux regional chapter of the Muslim Students of France. "I think it's also the responsibility of the parents to control their children. They don't have any control. The whole social structure of the [ghettos] is completely different."

Another millstone on the French underclass may be France's stagnant, heavily regulated economy, which many analysts argue favors those with jobs at the expense of those who need them.

So where does France go from here? In a national address Monday, Premier Dominique de Villepin promised more money for community associations and housing renovation and more help for jobseekers. He talked about apprenticeships for those failing at school and scholarships to those succeeding.

Still up in the air is whether France will begin practicing affirmative action, which Europeans call "positive discrimination." Sarkozy proposed it last year but was rebuffed by Villepin and President Jacques Chirac, who dismissed the idea as un-French.

Villepin promised yesterday to tackle discrimination, however, calling this a "moment of truth" for France.

"The struggle against all discriminations must become a priority for our national community," he said in a speech to parliament. "They are a reality today for all the inhabitants of troubled neighborhoods when they look for housing, a job or even... leisure activities."

Affirmative action = racism.
Positive discrimination is absolutely the correct description of "affirmative action." Racism, sexism, ageism -- it's all the same: elitism.
Our government's continued support of institutional racism, sexism, ageism, A.K.A., ~~affirmative action~~ positive discrimination is shameful.

The 800 lb gorilla in hiring decisions would still be:

DO YOU SUPPORT BIN LADEN OR NOT??

None of these people deserves a chance until they develop a reasonable attitude. They need to be directly told: You can think and say what you want, but you cannot expect anyone to hire you if you believe anything extremist.

When they sent those fake resumes with arab names on them...it would have been reasonable after 9-11 for those resumes to have written next to their arab names: "I support democracy in the middle east". Arabs, for a generation, will have to predict BEFOREHAND that people will wonder if they have extremist views (such as admiring Bin Laden). They must proactively state to all concerned "I am not one of THOSE arabs. I am a good arab."

But it crumbled under the pressure of the entry of millions of Muslims from France's former North African colonies, who came from starkly different cultural traditions.

Crumbled under the pressure of millions of socialist bureaucrats is my guess.

Someone in the French corporate world needs to point out what I just said. They need to say "We will not discriminate based on race...but we will discriminate based on attitude.".

Also, in Germany they just changed the job protection law to be irrelevant for 2 years after hiring. More people will now get hired in Germany. Of course, a lot of people will be fired before the 2 year mark unless they extend the term.

France needs such laws. The National Front is getting very popular.

But in France, where rioting by mostly Muslim youths has wracked the country for the last 12 days, affirmative action is illegal

Would you believe it, there actually is something to like about France.

The minimum wage is $10 an hour in a country a third less wealthy than the United States. Employers must pay steep social security taxes for each worker. A strict labor law makes it very difficult to fire people. That kind of system makes it uneconomical to hire low-skilled workers, some economists argue.

This is the key point. Too bad it's left until one of the last paragraphs and not explored deeply. The job market is horrible for everyone in France, not just the underclass. This is a country where people with PhD's aspire to being bus drivers and a career at McDonald's is something to be envied. The French are probably the most educated and most underemployed people in the world. And it's all the fault of socialism. Taxes and regulations make it uneconomical to hire people. Employers don't want to take risks on people who are not proven good workers. And they don't want to take risks on immigrant "youths" from the suburbs who have shown themselves to be less than trustworthy.

The riots are only making things worse for them. Not only will employers be even LESS likely to hire them, they are giving ammunition to the National Front who will most certainly gain in the next elections. For France, that would be a very good thing.

Would you believe it, there actually is something to like about France.

Yeah...Ludivine Sagnier.

( I wish to express my solidarity with the oppressed and downtrodden minorities of France in their quest for social justice - The man is the same everywhere - right on brothers - BBB )- sorry 60's flashback

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