Assimilationist France

Chez Naawm, Sophie Masson discusses something a lot of us tend to forget, if we ever knew it at all: France isn't suffering from "that multicultural crap" in the Canadian sense. Their official policy on immigrants is assimilation:

The French method of absorbing immigrants traditionally aims at effacing ethnic identity in the one, indivisible, secular French Republic.

The fact that they have a "method" on this is strange and depressing — benign neglect worked fine for the generations of US immigrants whose children and grandchildren run the country now — but they at least grasp the fact that a nation is something more than a purely arbitrary assortment of people who happen to have similar license plates.

But make up your own mind; read it. There's too much uninformed yap about this issue.

She also says what a lot of people have said, but says it better than most:

This ... is the traditional Paris mob, feared since 1789. And the government's reaction, veering in panic-stricken indecision from one wildly contradictory solution to another, is also traditional.

I'm not laughing at them, by the way. It really just isn't funny. Were the Detroit riots in 1967 amusing?