France Riots

Mr. Joel Kotkin looks at the riots in France, and the role of socialist policies in enabling and in fact causing them.^[1] He makes some telling points about the "brain drain," as those who work to become educated make their way out of Europe, and about the higher unemployment rates among the young and more so among the young immigrants.

We here in the United States are not perfect. Far from it. We are not so far from the days of "No Irish Need Apply." We would do well to remember in our push for "multiculturalism" that it was not multiculturalism that settled much of the tension between the varied European heritages of our early immigrants, but rather that we assimilated them to us and us to them, a merging that has in more recent days been described as a "melting pot." Where is that melting pot today? Where is the drive in today's immigrants to become "American," and the willingness of society to, even reluctantly, let them do so? For if we push them away, if we force them to stay ever immigrant, ever hyphenated, will they push back endlessly? Can we expect that?