"At any rate, the situation is one which doesn't seem to have a solution, either immediate or long term."
It has a solution, several solutions.
Rather than talking about the various solutions that would make things better, I'll just tell you what will happen.
The government will talk a lot about law and order, and send in police to many places, but they won't start shooting down the rioters.
The rioters will be confined geographically to the areas where they live, and there will be many arrests. Eventually, when a lot of cars have been burnt and windows smashed, relative calm will be restored by simple gravity. People cannot remain on riot forever. The Beurs will be worse off than ever, because shops in their areas will be destroyed. The rest of France will be as determined as ever to keep them out of jobs, etc.
And things will return to the status quo, albeit with more simmering violence and property damage.
The other things that could be done: full-scale affirmative action and expansion of government jobs programs, have problems with them. The first violates French morality by favoring one citizen over another based on race. Americans under Nixon went the affirmative action route, and it worked, but French thinking about the equality of man is too rigid, and the French will rather endure riots and erect barriers to further isolate the bad areas than they will be willing to consider a derogation from the principle of fundamental equality under the law.
Massive government jobs programs will not be sustainable on the French budget.
Cutting labor regulations so that the private sector could produce more jobs is politically acceptable also, for that will provoke a General Strike of the working whites all over the country, and bring down the government.
So, the "solution" will be to further isolate and hem in the Beurs, and to keep them more closely guarded.
I don't have the time to reply properly to your comments, as they deserve. Running out the door.
But affirmative action did not "work". Sure, a lot of black people got jobs, but resentment increased (both races), and is yet increasing. It increased feelings of entitlement among blacks, and resentment among whites, Asians and others who were qualified but rejected and less qualified blacks admitted or hired.
In the long run, affirmative action (in the sense of hiring unqualified or less qualified people solely because of race) is a very bad idea.
If by affirmative action, job training and education leading to employment is made available to the undereducated and unemployed, this is a very good thing. But to have different standards for members of different races or ethnic groups is just buying trouble. And France already has trouble enough.