The French riots show how entrenched inequalities have become

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Imagine two states. The first is proudly Christian, it has allowed apartheid in living memory and racism is mentioned more frequently in the media than anywhere else in the developed world. The second is entirely secular and legally prohibits collecting data on people’s race, a conscious effort by its leaders to avoid using race to divide or divide.

What do you think will give people of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds the best odds of success? Than to become equal participants in society? The answers revealed in the data were surprising.

In 2021, the unemployment rate in the United States was 5.5 percent for those born in the country, and 5.6 percent for those born abroad. Black and white hiring rates are now neck and neck. In France, unemployment is seven percent among native-born, but 12 percent for immigrants, and has risen to 17 percent among those who arrived in the past 10 years. Likewise, comparisons are with Britain, whose demographics and colonial history perhaps constitute a fairer standard.

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After a week of riots across France, spurred on by the death of a teenager of North African descent who was shot by police at a traffic stop, these statistics are worth revisiting. While the number of arrests decreased this week, there is still a need for a serious conversation about how France continues to fail immigrant communities and neighborhoods.

Just as France’s 2005 bout of urban violence, or the London riots of 2011, fractious relations between the police and ethnic minorities have sparked unrest fueled by deprivation and social exclusion. The rioters tend to come disproportionately from disadvantaged neighborhoods: those without a stake in the community have little to lose in burning it down.

Across the West, black and brown men are bitterly used to being disproportionately targeted by police for stop-and-search, but the scale of the disparity in France is appalling. In London, blacks are two to three times as likely as their white counterparts to be arrested, but in Paris the number rises to six times, and nearly eight times for those of Arab descent.

Encounters with French police are also more deadly, as officers are routinely armed and allowed to shoot people who fail to comply with traffic stops if they are deemed to pose a safety risk. There were 26 fatal police shootings in France in 2022, compared to just two in the UK. In the past 18 months, French police have shot dead 17 people during a traffic stop, like the incident that sparked the recent riots.

Last Friday as the unrest escalated, the two largest police unions issued a statement declaring they were “at war” with “vermin” and “savage hordes”. This culture of hostility has grown since Nicolas Sarkozy abandoned neighborhood policing two decades ago, in favor of more repressive tactics. To be sure, any future government led by Marine Le Pen’s far-right party will only lean towards adversarialism.

There is little sign of improvement in integration. One in five foreign-born French residents believe they experience discrimination, the highest proportion shared with Italy in the developed world. Meanwhile, French immigrants are three times more likely than those born in the country to be in poverty. In the UK, poverty rates for immigrants and for others are the same.

This French inequality is exacerbated by decades of failed urban policies that have led to the concentration of immigrant communities in the suburbs, emphasizing their difference and impeding social mobility. The rich and poor nature of London comes with its own problems, but it has served as a bulwark against the petrification of the inequalities we see in France. Twenty-eight percent of recent French immigrants are now in the bottom tenth of income, compared to just eight percent of non-immigrants. In the UK, the figure is ten percent regardless of country of birth.

Despite claims that France is non-racial, the data tells a different story. Without reforms in both policing and social exclusion, there is little hope that these violent incidents will stop anytime soon.

[email protected], @jburnmurdoch

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