French riots show how entrenched inequalities have become

Imagine two countries. The first is proudly Christian, it allowed racial segregation in living memory, and racism is mentioned more frequently in its media than anywhere else in the developed world. The second is strictly secular and legally prohibits the collection of data on people’s race, a conscious effort by its leaders to avoid using ethnicity to differentiate or divide.

Which do you think would offer people from diverse racial and religious backgrounds the best prospects of success? Of becoming equal participants in society?

The answers revealed in the data are surprising.

In 2021, US unemployment was 5.5 per cent for those born in the country, and 5.6 per cent for those born overseas. Black and white employment rates are now neck and neck. In France, unemployment is 7 per cent among those born in the country, but 12 per cent for immigrants, rising past 17 per cent among those who arrived in the last 10 years. Comparisons with Britain, whose demographics and colonial history perhaps make for a fairer benchmark, are similarly damning.

Following a week of rioting across France,

spurred by the death of a teenager of North African descent shot dead by police at a traffic stop, these statistics are worth revisiting. While the number of arrests has declined this week, the need for a serious conversation about how France continues to fail its immigrant communities and their neighbourhoods remains.

Just as in France’s 2005 bout of urban violence, or London’s own riots in 2011, fractious relations between police and ethnic minorities provided the spark for unrest fuelled by deprivation and social exclusion. Rioters tend to come disproportionately from disadvantaged neighbourhoods: Those who don’t have a stake in society have little to lose in burning it down.

Across the West, young black and brown men have grown bitterly used to being disproportionately targeted by police stop and searches, but the magnitude of the disparity in France is shocking. In London, black people are between two and three times as likely to be apprehended as their white counterparts, but in Paris the figure rises to six times, and almost eight times for those of Arab origin.

Encounters with French police are more lethal, too, as officers are routinely armed and are allowed to shoot at people who do not comply with traffic stops if they are deemed to pose a safety risk. There were 26 fatal police shootings in France in 2022, compared with just two in Britain, and in the past 18 months French police have shot dead 17 people during traffic stops such as that which sparked the latest riots.

Last Friday, as the unrest escalated, the two largest police unions

declared they were “at war” with “vermin” and “savage hordes”.

This culture of hostility has grown since former French president Nicolas Sarkozy abandoned neighbourhood policing two decades ago, in favour of more repressive tactics. A future government led by Ms Marine Le Pen’s far-right party would surely only lean into the adversarial approach.

And there is little sign of improvement on integration. One in five of France’s foreign-born population believes he is discriminated against, the joint highest with Italy in the developed world. Meanwhile, France’s immigrants are almost three times as likely as those born in the country to be in poverty. In Britain, the poverty rates between immigrants and others are the same.

This French disparity is

compounded by decades of failed urban policy

resulting in immigrant communities being concentrated in the banlieues, emphasising their otherness and hampering social mobility. The cheek-by-jowl nature of wealth and poverty in London comes with its own problems, but has been a buttress against the ossification of inequality seen in France. Twenty-eight per cent of recent French immigrants are now in the lowest tenth of earners, compared with just 8 per cent of non-immigrants. In Britain, the figure is 10 per cent, regardless of country of birth.

Despite claims that France is race-blind, the data tells a different story. Without reforms in both policing and social exclusion, there is little hope that these violent episodes will cease any time soon. FINANCIAL TIMES

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