As an American, it’s wild hearing someone claim that migration is a net negative. I constantly patronize businesses founded by successive waves of immigrants (and, no, not just white ones if you’re making some racial argument), many of my colleagues were born in other countries, and our culture is full of things which came from around the world.

What’s going on in France is the product of specific policies and antipathies dating back to the colonial era, just as in the United States our problems date back to the way we never finished dealing with the impacts of slavery, but that doesn’t mean that immigration as a concept is flawed any more than, say, the British Post Office scandal means IT projects cannot produce trustworthy systems.