More Notes On Immigration -- Riots In France

In preparation for my immigration debate tomorrow, I have thought to study up on the recent riots that rocked the country of France from late June through the first two weeks of July. These riots present an object lesson in what can happen in the event of large-scale immigration of an insular group that assimilates slowly into the host population and is culturally very different.

Although these riots have certainly been mentioned in the American press, they have mostly either been intentionally downplayed or kept out of the main headlines here by such things as the Supreme Court decisions of June 30, the Ukraine war, the emerging presidential campaign, the Biden family scandals (in the conservative press only), the ongoing climate scam (in the liberal press only) and so forth. But in France the riots were very significant and impossible to ignore.

As background, detailed information about immigration in France is spotty, in part caused by a prohibition in the French constitution on the government collecting information on race and ethnicity. They do collect information on the number of immigrants living in the country, and the immigrants’ continents and countries of origin, although the data look to me like approximations at best. The most recent data from the statistical agency (2022) counted 7.0 million immigrants living in France, constituting just over 10% of the population. Supposedly that is down from 9.0 million in 2018, although they also say that the number of arrivals has exceeded the number of departures by a factor of 4 to 1; so again, it looks like rough approximations rather than an exact count.

The statistical agency presents this chart as to continent of origin of the immigrants. (The headline reads “Immigrants living in France in 2022 according to their continent of birth.”):

Thus almost half of the immigrants, about 3.5 million, come from Africa, and almost all of those from the partially French-speaking countries that include Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. Compared to the immigrants in the U.S., these immigrants in France have assimilated much more slowly into the local culture, and they largely live separately in heavily-immigrant communities that are characterized by high levels of welfare usage and public housing.

On June 27, a teenager named Nahel Merzouk was killed by French police in the Paris suburb of Nanterre after he started to drive away from a traffic stop in a stolen car. That was the spark that set off the riots.

Here is a collection from a source called Le Point (French language) on July 4, detailing some of the damages from the riots around the country to that point: 1105 buildings (public and private) attacked; 263 schools damaged; 269 attacks on police stations (including national and local); more than 1000 businesses vandalized or set on fire; and so forth. Relative to the size and population of the country, this was very comparable to the George Floyd riots in the U.S. in 2020. And the French riots continued well after July 4.

The French government has been assiduous in not breathing a word about the ethnicity of the rioters, like it is some kind of state secret. And to be fair, the riots were not just confined to the immigrants, but were something of a joint venture between the immigrants and the political far left. (Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the far left political movement called La France Insoumise, repeatedly refused to condemn the rioters.) The entire mainstream press has joined in the effort to suppress information about the ethnicity of the rioters, preferring instead to focus on a narrative of racism and discrimination being the cause of the riots. (See for example this piece from the BBC from July 6. There are many more such.)

However, enterprising independent journalists have figured out ways to get some real information. A source called L’Opinion on July 12 (French language) counted the names appearing as first names among a sample of some 335 of the people arrested in the riots. Of the 335, some 81 were named Mohamed, followed by 31 Yanis, 14 Rayan, 13 Ali, 11 Yacin, and 10 Ibrahim. In total, says L’Opinion, close to half (160 out of 335) of the sample it was able to obtain consisted of people with presumptively Arab-Muslim names.

An op-ed in today’s New York Post has the following quote from French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin: “Their goals are to destabilize our republican institutions and bring blood and fire down on France.” (The Interior Ministry in France is not comparable to our Department of the Interior, which runs the national parks, but more comparable to the Department of Homeland Security.)

You could try taking some of these young rioters aside and calmly explaining to them that France has done them a great favor allowing them to immigrate, and their economic condition is hugely superior to what it would be if they were back home in Algeria or Mali or wherever. You would get exactly nowhere. They have the massed forces of the left beating on them every day with a narrative of systems of oppression and discrimination and racism. Why would they not believe that?

Anyway, the lesson here is that mass immigration cannot just be looked at from the perspective of pure economic benefits to the immigrants and to the receiving country. As the numbers of immigrants get large relative to the native population, there are also issues of cultural and political stability and physical security that are equally if not more important.