Immigrant Riots

[Winston]

Sorry muxec, I'm afraid you're about 4 years late for that here.

Try Sweden. I'm told it's quite nice there, if you're able to stand the lack of free debate on certain issues.

[muxec]

With some "if"s it's quite nice here too

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Colon


Turns out one of those disturbances (a gasoline bomb thrown against the offices of the far-right party in the city of Bruges) was probably carried out by whiteys of the far left.

Yeah, but probably 'immigrant' whiteys.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by aneeshm


*sigh* . . . . .


As anticipated , Islam has become a major rallying point .

No, that's just D.F. 's fixation with Islam, which causes him to post comments like that, regardless of the facts.

But of course, he's the offspring of immigrants and gay, so he can't be prejudiced in any way....

[Lawrence of Arabia]

That the Lithuanians still speak their language, and feel Lithuanian, shows that the Russification decided by the Czar and continued by the Commies didn't work.

However, it did occur, since the central governments have done everything they could to destroy local cultures, just like the third Republic.

mais, non de dieu, thats exactly what I have been sayin for the last page! comment ça ce fait qu'il n'y a personne qui me comprend?

[Lawrence of Arabia]

That the Lithuanians still speak their language, and feel Lithuanian, shows that the Russification decided by the Czar and continued by the Commies didn't work.

However, it did occur, since the central governments have done everything they could to destroy local cultures, just like the third Republic.

mais, non de dieu, thats exactly what I have been sayin for the last page! comment ça ce fait qu'il n'y a personne qui me comprend? they just DIDNT SUCCEED like the french did because they COULDNT KILL OFF THE LANGUAGES AND CULTURES.

[Colon™]

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/375eb29a-52e4-11da-8d05-0000779e2340.html

Geography that helped Marseilles escape riots
By Martin Arnold
Published: November 11 2005 19:05 | Last updated: November 11 2005 19:05

Ask Jean-Claude Gaudin why Marseilles has seemed immune to the riots that swept France in the last two weeks and the mayor of France’s third-biggest city is likely to draw you a picture.

“These are the hills,” he says, sketching a semi-circle across a sheet of paper. “On the other side is the sea,” he barks, scrawling a line down the other side of the page. “We are here, in the middle, all together.”

Mr Gaudin’s graphically enhanced point is that Marseilles’ natural borders – steep hills to the north, east and south, with the sea to the west – have forced it to build HLMs, or high-rise council flats, in the city centre. He contrasts this with most French cities, which have housed their poor immigrants in outer-city suburbs – the infamous banlieues – physically and psychologically excluding them from the bourgeois city centres.

“Our HLMs are in the centre of the city, not 15km outside it, like the belt of suburbs running around Paris,” says Mr Gaudin. Walk in any direction from the picturesque port of Marseilles and it is easy to see what he means.

A few minutes’ walk from the tourist restaurants around the old port, Marseilles becomes a vibrant and colourful melting pot of cultures, where the sights, sounds and smells of the Maghreb mix with French and other Mediterranean cultures.

Scattered across the city are 62 mosques and Muslim prayer rooms. Some, like the Al-Quods mosque in the 1st arrondissement, are only a few doors away from a Jewish synagogue and a Catholic church. Italian pizzerias are neighbours with Moroccan patisseries, selling honey-drenched pastries.

Salah Bariki, an Algerian-born community leader in Marseilles, says there are few glaring inequalities in the city, with no obvious bourgeois areas. “In other cities, people in the banlieues feel excluded, so they burn what is around them. Here there is more solidarity,” he says.

As other French cities burst into flames, Marseilles stayed calm. At the peak of the riots, about 35 cars were burnt a night in the city, hardly more than the pre-riots average of 5 to 10 a night.

Marseilles’ diversity reflects its history as France’s gateway to successive waves of immigrants. Its 800,000 residents include 300,000 of Italian origin, 200,000 North African Arabs, and large communities of Comoran islanders, Corsicans, Armenians and Chinese.

Mr Gaudin says the city’s diversity has fostered a feeling among its residents that they are “first Marseillaise, before French, or immigrants”. This is reinforced by the city’s strong rivalry with Paris and its more bourgeois neighbour Aix-en-Provence.

To ease ethnic and religious tensions, the city formed Marseilles Espérance, an unusual partnership of church and state, in 1990, bringing the mayor together with the heads of its different faiths, Armenian Christians, Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, Jews and Orthodox Greeks.

Marseilles Espérance is credited with helping avoid racial retaliation in the 1990s, after a young Comoran immigrant was shot by far-right National Front activists and a white boy was killed by a young Arab. It also called for calm after the first Gulf war and the September 11 attacks.

Mr Gaudin says this shows how the strict division of church and state under a 1905 French law has been blurred in Marseilles. To prove this, he will on Thursday address the opening ceremony for the new Tabligh and Daova mosque.

Yet Marseilles is far from an idyll of racial harmony. There are police no-go zones, and police recently discovered a cache of weapons, including machine guns and a rocket launcher, in one such area. While previous generations of immigrants have integrated well, as shown by the 30 per cent of the city’s 16,000 hospital staff recruited from ethnic minorities, the more recent arrivals, such as Comoran islanders from the Indian Ocean, are finding it tougher.

Catherine Pophillat, who has worked with immigrants for two decades at Marseilles’ intercultural association for promotion and insertion, says many of the city’s 45,000 Comorans behave as though they are “still on their island”, causing difficulties at school and with finding a job.

But the city has overcome similar challenges in the past, such as the 450,000 French settlers, or pieds noirs, who arrived in the city after fleeing Algeria in 1962.

About 150,000 settled in the city, and many have never recovered from their sense of betrayal over Algerian independence, helping explain why the National Front regularly wins more than 20 per cent of the vote in Marseilles.

Jackie Blanc, the National Front’s head in Marseilles and a pied noir who left Algeria at the age of 25, says the recent rioting has boosted support for the far-right party. “Our programme is being proved increasingly correct.”

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the party’s leader, says it has recruited 2,000 to 3,000 members since the riots started. He plans to take full political advantage, appearing in a televised debate on Saturday and holding a rally in central Paris on Monday to ram home his anti-immigration message.

Marseilles may not be a perfect example of multi-racial harmony, but if mainstream politicians want to avoid a shift to the far right and a repeat of Mr Le Pen’s shock result – coming second in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections – they need to find answers to the problems of the banlieues. They could do worse than to learn from the experience of France’s southern gateway.

[Az]

Originally posted by molly bloom



No, that's just D.F. 's fixation with Islam, which causes him to post comments like that, regardless of the facts.

But of course, he's the offspring of immigrants and gay, so he can't be prejudiced in any way....

I thought you'd understand his natural predisposition to be bash festering religionist communities. Should he be ashamed of this?

Colon: I am not sure of the point of this: How is geographic proximity an indication of social status? Social housing is still social housing - that will still concentrate immigrants. As to feeling of solidarity, I don't think that I like my arab neighbours any more because I live next door to them, same with my ultraorthodox neighbours a few years ago - I simply get a more realistic picture - to the better and to the worse.

[Colon™]

You gave the answer to your question yourself.

[Az]

I just LOVE it when people answer me like this: elaborate, will you?

[Colon™]

No.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Az
Colon: I am not sure of the point of this: How is geographic proximity an indication of social status? Social housing is still social housing - that will still concentrate immigrants.

Correction: Social housing will concentrate the poor. They aren't all immigrants.

However, there are different kinds of concentration. In my affluent hometown, we have about 10% of social housing. And we barely had any problem during the whole riots (I've heard that two or three cars had burned in this town of 30,000).

It would be wrong to say that geography is the only reason, but it is a significant one: the poor living in the social housing are not living in a ghetto: ordinary housing is not even a walk away, they have middle-class or affluent friends, they have a diversity of role models.

For example, a friend of mine has grown up in the social housing of my hometown. His parents are divorced, his father is a factory worker, he shared his small bedroom with his hated brother. He had pretty much all the ordinary bearings of the dysfunctional youth. However, just like his friends (who included poor, middle-class and upper-class teens), he didn't fall into crime. There was a clear sense of what an ordinary life is, and it's about work and family. Studies would have been nice too.

Once he was done with highschool, he failed at joining the military police (his dream), and started to work as a low-scale worker in supermarkets. However, since all his friends were studying, he thought he was missing something. He started saving money, in order to study to become a project leader in construction. IMO, if this guy had grown up only among impoverished peers, and with the ghetto being his only perspective in life, things would have been different. He would have lacked such role models, and the "elite" among his peers would distinguish themselves by their force, or by the easy money they raise through traffics.

[Az]

Yes, but the problem ain't the poverty, in that case. The case it is the basic approach to life these immigrants share in their communities. I never actually had many close native Israeli friends till high school - still, I grew up fully assimilated, basically. So are most of my Russian friends. And French culture and society gives as much opportunity for this as the Israeli one. I think that what people like me and Datajack are trying to say here is that i't's first and foremost their "fault" - even though french society could maybe do more. We look at ourselves and see that we've made it just fine - why can't they? we're not superhuman - and we weren't given any priviledged treatment.

[Spiffor]

Az, I'll ask you why so many people couldn't be integrated, then. Why is only a specific part of the French population (the one living in the cités) that suffers from such a collective laziness?

I'm not saying that personal motivation doesn't count at all. There are several examples of ghetto childrens who had social and economic success. However, to achieve something when you're form the ghetto, you need three times the motivation and the work than when you're from a nice background to begin with. There are plenty of bostacles to overcome:
- overcoming the peer-pressure that pushes toward the bottom
- overcoming an education that is worse in the ghetto than elsewhere (the level of the students is so low, that the aims of the teachers are forced to be lower)
- overcoming stigma that you'll get from people out of the ghetto (because of your clothing, because of your maners, because of your accent)
- overcoming racial stigma, if you belong to the "minorités visibles" ( @ word)
- Overcoming the lack of middle-class culture, of a network of relationships*, of knowledge about the good studies and good jobs**, of money etc. that comes from the parents.



*this may sound absurd, but a network of relationships is very important. About 60% of all jobs in France are obtained through relationships (the piston that immensely discriminates between the new entrants on the labour market that have well-connected parents, and those who don't have any useful connections)

**Again, this may sound absurd, but there is a strong unequality about the choice of studies in France. The rich and the cultured will almost always push for their children to go to uni, and to good ones at that. The uneducated will tend to consider their children's studies as an achievement rather than as the norm. Besides, in poor neighborhoods, the educational system will orientate students much more often toward non-prestigious vocational training, and much more rarely toward the superior unis.

[DanS]

Irish origin is focused in obvious places like Boston, NYC, and Chicago, but is also widespread in upper South (mainly 18th c Ulster "Scots Irish")

You're forgetting several waves of Irish immigrants. The Irish are widespread pretty much throughout the US, including rural areas (where they settled in the small towns).