Muslim-Aztek Musings

Opinion Journal lays out the differences between minority populations in France and the US:

Between 1978 and 2002, the percentage of foreign-born Americans nearly doubled, to 12% from 6.2%. At the same time, the five-year average unemployment rate declined to 5.1% from 7.3%. Among immigrants, median family incomes rose by roughly $10,000 for every 10 years they remained in the country.

These statistics hold across immigrant groups, including ones that U.S. nativist groups claim are "unassimilable." Take Muslims, some two million of whom live in America. According to a 2004 survey by Zogby International, two-thirds are immigrants, 59% have a college education and the overwhelming majority are middle-class, with one in three having annual incomes of more than $75,000. Their intermarriage rate is 21%, nearly identical to that of other religious groups.

It's true that France's Muslim population--some five million out of a total of 60 million--is much larger than America's. They also generally arrived in France much poorer. But the significant difference between U.S. and French Muslims is that the former inhabit a country of economic opportunity and social mobility, which generally has led to their successful assimilation into the mainstream of American life. This has been the case despite the best efforts of multiculturalists on the right and left to extol fixed racial, ethnic and religious identities at the expense of the traditionally adaptive, supple American one.

In France, the opposite applies. Mass Muslim migration to France began in the 1960s, a period of very low unemployment and industrial labor shortages. Today, French unemployment is close to 10%, or double the U.S. rate. Unlike in the U.S., French culture eschews multiculturalism and puts a heavy premium on the concept of "Frenchness." Yet that hasn't provided much cushion for increasingly impoverished and thus estranged Muslim communities, which tend to be segregated into isolated and generally unpoliced suburban cities called banlieues. There, youth unemployment runs to 40%, and crime, drug addiction and hooliganism are endemic.

You'd think all American minority groups would understand that they don't live in France; they live instead in the land of opportunity. Most do, but not all, as lgf points out today about La Voz de Aztlan:

Today, here in Los Angeles, we are already seeing ominous signs of an impending social explosion that will make the French rebellion by Muslim and immigrant youths seem “tame” by comparison. All the ingredients are present including a hostile and racist police as in France. ...

The social and economic conditions that exist in France that adversely affect its immigrant and Muslim populations also exist here in the USA. These conditions negatively affect our Black, Latino and immigrant populations in the same way. The rebellion that is occurring in France can and will most probably happen here. If it does, it will have grave consequences on the social, political and economic structures of the country and it could possibly topple a government already weakened by the Iraq War and corruption within its ranks.

It's a shame these folks have raised victimhood to such a fine art. But pity can only go so far. As Jim, who gets a hattip for all this, said, "We know for a fact that the 'bad guys' all are willing to work together, or at least to exchange information ... shouldn't we be paying more attention?"