The WSJ's editorial on the Muslims rioting in France focuses not on what's wrong with Muslims, and certainly not on what's wrong with mass Third World Immigration but on what's wrong with France.
And then they stop in the middle of the attack on France to criticize "nativist groups." Their economic argument seems to be that Muslim immigrants weren't allowed to take jobs away from Frenchmen, but should have been. The way they are in that immigrant's paradise, the United States of America:
Among immigrants, [in the US]median family incomes rose by roughly $10,000 for every 10 years they remained in the country.These statistics hold across immigrant groups, including ones that U.S. nativist groups claim are "unassimilable." Take Muslims, some two million of whom live in America. According to a 2004 survey by Zogby International, two-thirds are immigrants, 59% have a college education and the overwhelming majority are middle-class, with one in three having annual incomes of more than $75,000. Their intermarriage rate is 21%, nearly identical to that of other religious groups.
It's true that France's Muslim population—some five million out of a total of 60 million—is much larger than America's. They also generally arrived in France much poorer. But the significant difference between U.S. and French Muslims is that the former inhabit a country of economic opportunity and social mobility, which generally has led to their successful assimilation into the mainstream of American life. This has been the case despite the best efforts of multiculturalists on the right and left to extol fixed racial, ethnic and religious identities at the expense of the traditionally adaptive, supple American one.
OpinionJournal - French Lessons |How to create a Muslim underclass, November 11, 2005
First, the reason that US Muslims are more successful than those in France is because the US gets the upper classes of the Arab world. They might have inappropriate influence on Karl Rove and Grover Norquist, they may fund terror, they may, for all I know, have been the anthrax mailers. I do know that nineteen members of the Arab upper classes destroyed the World Trade Center. But I don't expect them to burn any cars, unless they set their own cars on fire for the insurance.
Since the US doesn't have a border with North Africa, or a previously existing Muslim ghetto, it doesn't get the banlieu types. What the United States has instead is a border with Mexico, and and previously existing barrios. And that's where riots may come from.
The economic argument the WSJ seems to be making is this: America's immigrant underclass isn't rioting because they're being allowed to take jobs from Americans.
And the horror of French "discrimination" is that this isn't being allowed in France. If the United States manages real immigration enforcement, and there are riots as a result, is the WSJ going to make the same argument?
But the real point here is that there is nothing immigrants can do that will make the WSJ admit immigration is a problem.
And now, not riots all across Europe. Nothing.
But in response to all those events, the WSJ's staff didn't attack the immigrants who did the crimes, or the system that let them. They reserved their sharpest criticism for us "nativists."
