Joel Kotkin puts his finger on why immigrants don't riot in the U.S. and why there is so much disaffection among immigrants in Europe. Kotkin's answer in a nutshell is that socialism and other Left-wing policies, especially heavy government regulation of business, have stifled European economies to the point where there simply aren't any jobs available for those who want work no matter how menial.
Here are some excerpts from Kotkin's essay:
Since the '70s, America has created 57 million new jobs, compared with just four million in Europe (with most of those jobs in government). In France and much of Western Europe, the economic system is weighted toward the already employed (the overwhelming majority native-born whites) and the growing mass of retirees. Those ensconced in state and corporate employment enjoy short weeks, early and well-funded retirement and first dibs on the public purse.
So although the retirement of large numbers of workers should be opening up new job opportunities, unemployment among the young has been rising: In France, joblessness among workers in their 20s exceeds 20%, twice the overall national rate. In immigrant banlieues, where the population is much younger, average unemployment reaches 40%, and higher among the young.
To make matters worse, the elaborate French welfare state--government spending accounts for roughly half of GDP compared with 36% in the U.S.--also forces high tax burdens on younger workers lucky enough to have a job, largely to pay for an escalating number of pensioners and benefit recipients. In this system, the incentives are to take it easy, live well and then retire. The bloat of privileged aging blocks out opportunity for the young.
Luckily, better-educated young Frenchmen and other Continental Europeans can opt out of the system by emigrating to more open economies in Ireland, the U.K. and, particularly, the U.S. This is clearly true in technological fields, where Europe's best brains leave in droves. Some 400,000 European Union science graduates currently reside in the U.S. Barely one in seven, according to a recent poll, intends to return.
Driven by the ambitious young, European immigration to the U.S. jumped by 16% during the '90s. Visa applications dropped after 9/11, but then increased last year by 10%. The total number of Europe-born immigrants increased by roughly 700,000 during the last three years, with a heavy inflow from the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, and Romania--as well as France. These new immigrants have been particularly drawn to the metropolitan centers of California, Florida and New York.
Particularly telling, immigrant business ownership [in the U.S.] has been surging far faster than among native-born Americans. Ironically, some of the highest rates for ethnic entrepreneurship in the U.S. belong to Muslim immigrants, along with Russians, Indians, Israelis and Koreans.
Perhaps nothing confirms immigrant upward mobility more than the fact that the majority have joined the white middle class in the suburbs--a geography properly associated here mostly with upward mobility.
It is almost inconceivable to see such flowerings of ethnic entrepreneurship in Continental Europe. Economic and regulatory policy plays a central role in stifling enterprise. Heavy-handed central planning tends to make property markets expensive and difficult to penetrate. Add to this an overall regulatory regime that makes it hard for small business to start or expand, and you have a recipe for economic stagnation and social turmoil.
What would help France most now would be to stimulate economic growth and lessen onerous regulation. Most critically, this would also open up entrepreneurial and employment opportunity for those now suffering more of a nightmare of closed options than anything resembling a European dream.
We wonder if anyone is listening over at The Nation and other Lefty precincts where the sorts of nostrums that have led Europe to become an economic dead man walking are incessantly promoted in the name of social justice. The young Muslims who are setting France ablaze are evidently not much impressed with socialist versions of economic justice.
We should point out, too, that as compelling as Kotkin's economic analysis is, there's no doubt another reason we don't see in the U.S. the sort of mass vandalism against property that France is suffering. That reason is that most Americans own a firearm, and any crowd of hooligans strutting down a street threatening to burn residents' automobiles is likely to be abruptly brought to account in a most unhappy fashion by the citizens whose cars are about to be torched. The prospect of a chest full of #6 lead shot is a powerful inducement to find less obnoxious ways to air one's grievances.
Of course, taking away this ability to defend one's property is another one of those nutty Left-wing policies whose utter foolishness is being made evident by events in France.
