Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [119]
The young men he was cursing, on the other hand, are not immigrants at all; almost all of them were born in France, and they all are fluent in the country’s language and customs and indistinguishable in most ways, but for their addresses, banlieue slang expressions, and complexions, from any French teenagers. Theirs was not the anger of foreigners. France is a country of immigrants—a quarter of its 65 million people either are foreign-born or are the children or grandchildren of immigrants,1 and this, in itself, has not caused tension.
The anger in 2005 was not Islamic, either. Among the countless chronicles of those months, including the conclusions of the French intelligence service, there are no credible records of any Muslim messages or motives in the riots.2 Among French-born children of Algerians, only 4 percent say they attend mosques more than once a year, and the largest group is totally non-observant, making them just as secular as white French kids.3 Almost all of the rioters of 2005 were French citizens, and repeated studies have shown that they share the values and attitudes of native-born French youth, even if their “banlieue culture” forbids them entry into mainstream French society—in fact, this was itself the point of the riots.4 In their mass confrontations with police, the rioters often held their French ID cards in the air. People were mystified by the lack of slogans or messages in this vast (but almost non-lethal) uprising, what the French police intelligence service described as a “kind of non-organized insurrection without a leader or manifesto”—but these ID cards were the manifesto, they were the message. This was a battle of French against French, a battle for acceptance.
Still, there was something different about these young men. Their parents, unlike Aziz, came to the outskirts of Paris as villagers. By “immigrants,” he means that they are rural migrants making their first foray into urban space, the situation faced by the great majority of families in Les Pyramides and throughout the periphery of Paris.
Like some 50 million other Europeans, they live in an arrival city.5 In those autumn months of 2005, the European arrival city violently announced its presence to the world. France had seen riots and acts of destruction in its banlieues frequently, since the early 1980s, when the French children of its North African immigrants first came of age. But this was a terminal moment: France had cut off an entire generation’s future, blocking the path forward to the city and backward to the village, and thousands of young people reacted in the only way they knew.
There has long been a tendency to refer to the neighborhoods on the Paris outskirts, and similar neighborhoods across the West, as “immigrant ghettos” or “ethnic enclaves,” and to attribute their failings and eruptions to a perceived racial and ethnic segregation. When you examine them as arrival cities, though, the distinguishing thing about Les Pyramides and its even uglier siblings is not ethnic ghettoization but extreme heterogeneity.
The sociologist Loïc Wacquant has built his career on proving that the French banlieues and other “neighbourhoods of relegation” across Europe are not at all segregated in the sense of classic American black ghettos but are, instead, “anti-ghettos,” places that are, in fact, very multi-ethnic—and this, he argues, is precisely the problem: these neighborhoods are places of “advanced marginality” that haven’t been able to form any sort of community at all, ethnic or otherwise. They “are characterized by their low to moderate levels of segregation and lack of demographic coherence and cultural unity … the demands of their residents are fundamentally social, having to do not with difference or ‘diversity’ but equality in treatment by or