By E.G Austin – The Economist
One of the interesting aspects of immigration in France is that it highlights the tension between integration and anti-discrimination. Like other countries, France has at times been in the business of soliciting immigrants, but not just any immigrants. Of course, as we saw with Australia, a country can't just pick and choose its immigrants, unless it has the will and the capacity to fiercely enforce its borders against irregular migration. And so France, in recognition of this reality and with its high degree of cultural self-regard, adopted an aggressive stance on integration. Patrick Simon, the head of France's National Institute for Demographic Studies, explained that by the 2005 "integration contract", would-be immigrants were checked on "integration skills" such as knowledge of French values and norms, and linguistic proficiency. Integration was thereby not just an abstract concept or a vague policy goal: it was a selection criterion. "The idea is to produce invisibility," said Mr Simon, "invisibility so equality will be reached."
But there is an implicit contradiction between integration, says Mr Simon, and the anti-discrimination provisions France has also adopted. Integration aims to try to change immigrants, to make them the same as other French people; anti-discrimination rules are meant to change the system, to accommodate people who aren't the same. This mixed message from the state has contributed to the tensions that are apparent over, for example, whether women should be allowed to wear the burqa in public. And homogeneity is harder for some groups to achieve than others. Mr Simon said that in his research, surveys had found that although most foreign-born French people say that they feel French, fully half of the racial minorities—people from Africa, the French Caribbean, and Arabs—said that they do not feel that other people see them as French.
This confusion exists in other countries, although less overtly than in France. In the United States, as mentioned, anti-discrimination is a well-established value. Explicit efforts at integration, however—such as English-only rules—are controversial. This is because they are seen to represent an encroachment on identity. (That may be because the motive behind such efforts is, in fact, to erode minority identities.) Thinking about it in those terms brings out the wisdom of Canada's approach. If you've established multiculturalism as a national principle, then you can in good conscience push people to integrate, because embracing your cultural heritage is a sign of integration rather than the opposite. Clever, Canada, tautological but clever.
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