Two perspectives on France

Gerard Henderson's column today on the French and their riots is interesting. The key argument:

"France practises integration with respect to its ethnic minorities, from North Africa and Arab nations, in the sense that the French do not formally recognise their existence....

Anyone who has residence in France is expected to act like the French. There is no public recognition that immigrants to France - or their children or grandchildren - might like to preserve part of their ethnic culture or native language or that this might benefit France. There is no French equivalent of SBS and there are few government sponsored organisations for inter-ethnic dialogue. It's a case of when in France do as the French do."

Australia, on the other hand, is successfully multicultural, because it acknowledges that migrants might want to preserve part of their heritage:

"The fact is that multiculturalism has worked well in Australia and has contributed to an accepting society. The tests? Well, inter-marriage rates between ethnic groups are relatively high. And the level of ethnic motivated crime is relatively low. France's contemporary social problems have nothing to do with multiculturalism but, rather, much to do with its absence."

Mark Steyn's latest on Europe advances a not too dissimilar line, in that he points out that most European countries are bi-cultural (with one culture being Muslim.) Using the situation in Fiji as an example, he points out that this is inherently more unstable (at least when the minority starts to become the not so minority due to population growth) than multicultural countries, like the US and Australia. As he wittily puts it:

"One way to avoid it would be to go genuinely multicultural, to broaden the Continent's sources of immigration beyond the Muslim world. But a talented ambitious Chinese or Indian or Chilean has zero reason to emigrate to France, unless he is consumed by a perverse fantasy of living in a segregated society that artificially constrains his economic opportunities yet imposes confiscatory taxation on him in order to support an ancien regime of indolent geriatrics."

God, he can write!