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The ongoing French riots bring into sharp relief the fantasy that if we just don't talk about race or religion, the issue will disappear. To be clear, I still prefer the French approach because if you don't measure something you can't really do much about it. The main beneficiary of France suddenly going the US/UK route of meticulously collecting racial and religious statistics wouldn't be the far-right but rather the far-left. Racial and possibly religious quotas would soon follow with official state-sanctioned discrimination as the end result.
Yet the rioters clearly view themselves as apart from French society. Even genteel liberal journalists concede as much.
What are the long-term effects going to be? Perhaps I am cynical but I suspect nothing much. France had these kinds of riots in 2005 and they changed nothing.
I remembering reading a lot about Islam and immigration in the 2010-2012 time period, during which many UK conservative personalities were praising the French approach of "aggressive assimiliationism" as opposed to the supposedly feeble multiculturalist approach preferred by the UK. It seems to me that there's no functional difference. The UK had its own riots in 2011. One could plausibly make the case that the BLM riots in the US during 2014 and then 2020 fall under the same rubric.
Whatever the system, these periodic events happen in diverse societies and then they are forgotten until the next outbreak. The system isn't strong enough to overcome racial and religious differences completely but it's also much stronger than many right-wing doomers seem to think. After the kerfuffle everyone moves on. There's no reason to think it will be different this time.
The mass delusion that is 'Integration' and 'Assimilation' keeps on giving.
These two concepts mean the same thing, functionally. Do I have enough plausible deniability to call the obvious outsider I am ingrouping an insider?
Note that this definition has nothing to do with real life. It's purely conceptual.
Outside of that these terms hold no meaning at all. Have I assimilated into a country when all I do is participate in its economy? That seems to be the barometer for most. It's hard for anyone with practical experience to get behind that definition but after we've deconstructed most of our societies down to economic blocks there's not much else to go on. So our newly arrived Syrian who just got gifted a new home renovates a newly furnished living room and kitchen on the local governments dime to separate them with a wall so he does not have to see his wife cook is just as 'assimilated' as any local because... OK, maybe not in real life. But he shows up for work and seem nice so my tend and befriend instincts tell me there are inroads to be made here. So I'll weave a fictional representation of reality in my head to support my instincts and admonish any representative of my ingroup who doesn't conform as being an evil person. I mean, who doesn't want to make friends? Such combative instincts can only lead to conflict and are obviously dangerous. The Syrian is assimilating, even if he talks arabic at home, even if he changes nothing of his behavior, even if he lives nigh entirely on the governments dime and gets treated to luxuries most people can hardly afford nowadays, like a single family home, whilst working a minimum wage job...
This is not 'assimilation'. This is a bribe. Please be my friend.
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