Why America and France have very different experiences with immigration | Hacker News Reader

Why America and France have very different experiences with immigration

economist.com

11 pointscwan6 comments

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)

"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.

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

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.

     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.

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.

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