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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Much narrower margin, even after Macron moved significantly to the right on cultural issues over the last 5 years: https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/emma...

https://www.newsweek.com/macron-france-reject-american-woke-...

France seems like it’s between a real rock and a hard place. On one hand they don’t have the cultural infrastructure to assimilate Muslim immigrants. On the other hand, they can’t keep their economy running without immigrants. Neither Macron nor Le Pen have a solution to that fundamental problem.

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France does not need migrants to run its economy. This is no longer the 60s.

Systemic unemployment is high, unemployment among the young is very high. Economically there is no need for immigrants.

I don't think any European country has a solution (at least an 'acceptable' solution) to assimilate Muslim immigrants. Very bluntly, IMHO assimilation is not possible, only integration with society becoming multi-cultural.

>I don't think any European country has a solution (at least 'acceptable' solution) to assimilate Muslim immigrants. Very bluntly, IMHO assimilation is not possible, only integration with society becoming multi-cultural.

It doesn't help that worldwide media suppresses news coverage of the problems Muslim immigrants bring.

Over the past week there has been a series of Muslim riots in Sweden against a Dane's threat (not actually carried out, as I understand) to burn a Quran. When I heard about the rioting, I searched for news coverage on YouTube. Here are the first two I found:

* France 24: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey0XIy2rXBk>

* BBC <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C00R1gjsT6A>

Pay attention to both what is said and is not said.

What would someone who has watched the videos, and knows nothing else, conclude regarding who is rioting, and what are they upset about?

I then found

* Global News <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRtv33CLSOc>

* The Telegraph <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-k5qLi1MAM>

which also obfuscate. NBC News <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=325v8PPbWe0> was the first outlet that I found that actually attributed the rioting to Muslims. (All three sources use the same/similar footage from a press agency.)

At the same time, /r/worldnews had two posts on Islamic countries' condemnations of the Swedish government not banning Quran burnings. Such were the only mention of the riots; absolutely nothing on the riots themselves. Four days later, nothing has changed, except one article ... blaming the riots on Russia. <https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=subreddit%3Aworldnews+riot&...>

> It doesn't help that worldwide media suppresses news coverage of the problems Muslim immigrants bring.

Because when you report on minorities causing troubles, you need to be extremely careful. Parts of what you say will be quoted out of context, repeated by people you want nothing to do with and used against the people who have nothing to do with what happened. I don't blame journalists and news agencies they think twice before doing it. But I do agree they should do it instead of burying the head in the sand and forcing the reader to read between the lines.

Well I can only say that this observation on how the mainstream media likes to suppress news like this only tells you that you need to be skeptical on what is shown by them and look at other sources beyond the mainstream media.

The young people don't want the jobs that the immigrants are willing to take.

They want their cake and bread served to them on a silver platter, to which they can then pitch a hissy fit and knock the platter away as not being made out of gold.

We have a similar problem here in the US.

Marine Le Pen moved a lot more towards the center though.

Her "talk" might have moved towards center. If she was in power the talk would be forgotten -- Just like with other politicians pandering for votes. The tiger doesn't change its stripes.

> Neither Macron nor Le Pen have a solution to that fundamental problem.

They don't have it as it's a few decades too late. Bataclan didn't happen by accident. Whoever decides to do something about it, they will have to move with extreme care.

UK tried pretending everyone is white and plays cricket in the summer. This has stopped and reversed if anything, at least in the public sphere.

I don’t know how effective it is but at least there isn’t a chunk of population being continuously told “this is British and you aren’t it”.

Brexit of course threw a lot or confusion, who knows what the official line is now...

Saying they don't have the "cultural infrastructure" to assimilate immigrants sounds like it's letting them off the hook for a lot.

You can’t create a society welcoming to immigrants with sympathetic, cosmopolitan liberals brow beating everyone else into toleration. As someone from a Muslim country I’d never move to a place like that.

I'm not even sure what you mean, but as an American Muslim, I guess it's not my problem.

France is an ethnostate. It’s a country where the whole history and culture is intertwined with that of a single Germanic tribe. A Muslim immigrant to France will never be French in the same way a French immigrant to Bangladesh will never be Bangladeshi. Whatever welcome Muslim immigrants enjoy in France therefore depends on the sympathetic feelings of people who embrace immigration or multiculturalism for ideological reasons. That’s a thin shell on which to build a life.

wdym cultural infrastructure?

I know nothing about France fwiw

America has machinery within the culture that allows immigrants to assimilate. Americans treat them as American and they feel American. I don’t mean the sympathy liberals feel to immigrants—this is a cultural pattern that operates in South Georgia as much as it operates in New York City. I’d call it “legalistic pluralism.” You’re “an American” if you’re legally a citizen and can recite some platitudes about the Constitution, the Founding Fathers, and apple pie.

In France, “Frenchness” is bound up in a millennium of shared culture and history, a thousand different kinds of cheese, etc. That’s what causes friction with Muslim immigrants. They don’t want to be French—in particular, embrace the deeply held value of secularism—and that drives French people nuts.

Should note of course it's the specific brand of "French secularism" that is a thorny issue. It's a type of secularism that provokes a negative reaction from most Americans as well (though IDK if there has been any polling on the issue).

Specifically, the French brand of secularism known as ‘Laïcité’.[0]

Another major difference in France's ‘cultural infrastructure’ is that they are constitutionally race-blind and don't record ethnic statistics.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secularism_in_France#Contrast_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_censuses...

Yeah right. In the south, they are all about everyone being American as long as they can recite some platitudes about the Constitution.

France has a much fairer system for integration. Everything is based on how good you perform. Until you finish your studies, every major test is completely anonymous. You can become a doctor without ever having to pass in front of a Jury who may be biased by the way you look, what you believe in, or where you come from.

France has not suffered from the same deeply rooted racial discrimination the US still suffers from. During the 19th and 20th centuries, France was a refuge for oppressed minorities.

It's essentially the same margin as Reagan's landslide against Mondale.

> On the other hand, they can’t keep their economy running without immigrants.

Can't they? Have they tried? Many countries manage to do so, and their populations aren't crying out for more immigration - China, Japan, pretty much all of eastern Europe...

There is a dire shortage of skilled and blue collar workers (nursing, construction, sanitation etc.) in Japan. So much so that a country like Japan is considering indefinite residence for these workers [1].

China is a very populous country now and is in its demographic golden age. It can do fine without any inward immigration. But with rapidly cratering birth rates it will be interesting to see what China does in next few decades to solve the problem.

[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/11/18/japan-mulls-ind...

Japan might let the 2.5% of its workforce that is foreign stay indefinitely? That doesn't sound very dire to me.

Of course it's very popular to conflate "economy will collapse without immigration" with "GDP growth will be 0-2% instead of 2-4%". Then say the economy is "stagnating" instead of "stable", and you're done.

China has their own internal immigrants that they worry about, and they need to kill a few million more Uighur Muslims before they're likely to need to worry about troublesome non-Han Chinese immigrating to the country and causing cultural problems.

Poland in recent years has been one of the most immigration-receiving countries, just in the quiet. A lot of people coming from the Subcontinent and also from Ukraine (well before the war too).

On the one hand lots of shouting about evil migrants stealing our honest bread, at the same time giving them all visas and work permits. Go figure.

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