French Political Review

So Sarkozy won the French election. Some people seem to think that he will adopt a more right-wing assimilationist attitude toward the Arab and African immigrants in the banileues. Effectively telling them to start "behaving" themselves or else. Others seem to think he will go a more American affirmative-action, integrationist route.

Now, because I generally dislike racist ultimatums and ethnocentric policies that smack of easy platitudes for the white majority, I favor the latter option. One thing that America is really, really good at is integrating immigrant minorities. It doesn't look like it sometimes, but we are actually a lot better at it than almost any other Western democracy (Canada's pretty good, too).

It's interesting to me that France's "you best become French and stop acting like there's anything better than Frenchiness anywhere in the universe" attitude doesn't seem to work nearly so well as Britian, Canada, and the US's, "hey, can we have some of your awesome food and perhaps listen to some exotic music together?" method of dealing with immigrants.

As always, the usual caveats about insular rural nativism in all cases applies.