Janson Thomas
Published: November 23, 2005
On Oct. 29, France’s Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin stated, “In our country, law and order will have the last word.” This statement was issued the day after two young men were electrocuted in France while evading police.
Maybe Villepin spoke too soon. France is now in uproar as mobs of mostly Muslim youth continue to riot in much of the country.
More than 6,000 cars have been set ablaze, businesses and homes have been destroyed, and the newly applied curfews are still being broken. To many around the world this is a shock, but in reality, this revolt has been a long time coming.
Radical north-African Muslims began pouring into France approximately 30 years ago. They left poverty in search of a new life in a new country, and France’s open-border policy made it all too easy.
As more people immigrated, they bunched up and soon had nowhere to turn. They now live in widespread poverty. They are forced to live in ghettos with minimal police presence, outrageous crime rates and an unemployment rate that is nearly double the nation’s average. They face persecution everyday for their ethnicity and religious beliefs. All of these things combined have fueled the riots in the past few weeks.
Today there are six million Muslims- most of them impoverished- living in France. Even though 10 percent of France’s population is now Muslim, the French still remained unconcerned with this growing social problem until it reached the point of disaster.
The Muslims will continue to vent the frustrations of their social situation and attempt to impose their religious beliefs onto the French as long as they are not integrated into French society and are allowed to cluster in ghettos, where fanaticism festers. It is a balloon that has continued to grow and grow; soon (if not already) it will pop.
The rioting should serve as a lesson for France. Although hindsight may always be 20-20, all they had to do was take a step back and look at the situation.
If millions of religious radicals are entering your country every year, they will try to push their beliefs on you whether you accept them or not- but particularly if you do not even attempt to integrate them into your society.
What has now escalated into a giant problem could have easily been prevented had France addressed the influx of North African immigrants before it had reached a crisis point.
France’s open-border policy, which allows anyone and everyone to enter the country with ease, is at fault. If France had recognized the problem and monitored immigration, or at least slowed it so the immigrants had had more time to integrate into society and not clump up into ghettos, it may not have faced the problem it is facing today.
It is a lesson that we, as Americans, can learn from. So many people today argue that we should allow more immigration into the U.S. and that we should open our borders; hopefully now they see that such a policy could have possibly catastrophic results.