

Why America and France have very different experiences with immigration  - cwan
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2009/12/naughty_french_words

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gommm
I think a big difference too has been the creation of ghettos (HLM
communities) in the 60s that concentrated all the poors in one area... Of
course, at the end of the Trente Glorieuses in 1974, when unemployment started
to rise in France those communities concentrated low skills laborers that were
the first to lose their jobs... So France ended having ghettoes full of people
who were poor, mostly immigrants with no real opportunity for work, how could
this work?

In smaller cities like Rennes, where they had a rule to limit such buildings
to a maximum of 25% of the population of an area, immigrants have been more
successful and better integrated (but of course, there might be other factors
in play like the overall lower percentage of immigrants)

------
tokenadult
"The French may feel relatively less pain during recessions, but that’s only
because they don't have it so great normally. The rigid labour market results
in high rates of unemployment."

That's an important point often forgotten in discussions of the current
worldwide recession.

~~~
niczar
Being unemployed in France is nowhere near as bad as in the US. You get free
healthcare and good unemployment benefits.

------
Asa-Nisse
America has immigration, France has refugees.

US sucks up all the skilled workers of the third world while Europe is easier
to reach from Africa and Asia. The important thing to realise here is that
there is a very big difference between the Iraqi businessman taking a flight
to New York and the illiterate Somali being chartered over to Spain.

------
Anon84

         So much of American exceptionalism has come from its
         ability to attract and integrate the world's most 
         talented migrants. Its dynamic labour market has been 
         integral to its success. It has allowed migrant to 
         thrive and even become a source of job growth for 
         natives.

------
niczar
Typical neoliberal bullshit from The Economist, the magazine who famously
blamed the irish for their laziness during the great potato famine.

Let me address a few points:

\- The apparently huge unemployment among the youth is meaningless due to the
huge enrollment in free higher education. Basically, those 18-24 who are
looking for a job are those who wouldn't stay in school, not those who
couldn't afford like in the US or even the UK. Not exactly surprisingly, they
are not all prime recruiting material.

\- Unemployment is defined as (read this carefully) the proportion of people
actively looking for a job. This means that if you want to reduce that ratio,
you can either give them jobs, or convince them to give up looking, for
example by giving them money for not looking. That's what they do in the UK or
in the Netherlands (relatively speaking). Guess what we do in France? The
exact opposite, we give you plenty of money if you look for a job.

\- I'm not entirely sure how blacks in the South have it better than Arabs in
France. I'm sure how they don't, though.

In conclusion, this yet another BS piece trying to extoll the theoretical
virtues of wage slavery in the face of overwhelming evidence of the contrary.

They can pry my 35h (which have worked to create jobs) from my cold dead
hands.

