I agree that our social, educational and cultural institutions are doing an absolutely atrocious job of integrating immigrant populations.
Despite that, I find that most people I know from the Maghreb are actually quite well integrated, mostly because as an educated, well-to-do person I hang around with other educated, well-to-do people and they tend to be quite nice to get along with.
I grew up in Houston (arrived age 6, left just before my 18th birthday), and honestly I find the way 'native'/anglo Texans treat Mexicans (more properly, Hispanics, but over there everyone calls them Mexicans) to be probably slightly worse on average than the way French people treat people of African descent.
However, the French welfare state + my god our educational system is so fucked it's not even funny mean that it's possible to get certain pathological cases where an immigrant will move to France, live off the welfare state while railing against everything French (post-colonial hatred) and then use that sweet welfare money to plan and execute terrorist attacks.
I don't blame that one the innate character of French people though, just on badly designed social institutions. Our current welfare state was modified by well-meaning leftists who were aiming to make something more egalitarian, but instead made everything worse, and then modified by well-meaning neoliberals who were aiming to make something more efficient, but instead made everything worse, and now it's starting to look like a big ugly pile of legacy code written in Perl.
This is a fair take. And my experience with Arabs who are well off and relatively secular in France and Spain, and even more so Maghrebis who quietly identify as Berbers, tracks with what you mean as far as their integration and acceptance. But I did live in Avignon for awhile and saw some of the worst of the well-meaning welfare state in action, just outside the city walls.
I'm not blaming the character of the French any more than the character of the Arabs, I just think the system is not built in a way like America where assimilation is the goal of either party.
If you don't mind, I'll chime in with an American perspective. America is itself not a perfect case on immigration. Beyond high-profile recent developments under Trump: per our history of official, state-led segregation - within living memory, and certainly within the memory of much of our existing municipal and physical infrastructure, and which famously was, in part, a model for what the Third Reich aimed to achieve - the road to assimilation for the individuals and populations seeking it is not of equal length and equally unimpeded for everyone.
Being educated helps a lot. Being wealthy helps a lot. Speaking English helps a lot. Being white helps a lot. Not having these attributes is not a deal-breaker (we DID manage to elect a black president), but they do significantly effect how someone and their children might be able to access the greater community, education, jobs, and more, and particularly outside of the immigrant community they might belong to. This is exacerbated by the state of our geography: America is big, and spread-out, and was built in its current form with an eye toward advantaging car-ownership and ethnic/economic segregation. It is possible to come to this country as someone who is not American, become American, and then become fabulously successful as an American, but it's not a given, and there are often headwinds.
It's a difficult problem. We shouldn't despair because our governments haven't been able to tackle it. It's one worth continuing to try at because the alternatives (terrorism and internecine violence on one end, a form of genocide on the other) are horrible.
I feel you are a bit harsh in this last comparison, this poor Perl codebase doesn't deserve such a stigmatization as to low it down at the level of systematic failure constructed by several generations of incompetent wannabe elite of the country regardless of continuous demonstration of total inability to take a single decision that make sense in regard to the goals of the mandate they are supposed to fulfill.
At least no one can pretend that Larry was missing the skills to handle the job, Perl community neither laked dedication on par with the flowing resources, and what they build still make stand a significant part of the internet diligently.
I agree that our social, educational and cultural institutions are doing an absolutely atrocious job of integrating immigrant populations.
Despite that, I find that most people I know from the Maghreb are actually quite well integrated, mostly because as an educated, well-to-do person I hang around with other educated, well-to-do people and they tend to be quite nice to get along with.
I grew up in Houston (arrived age 6, left just before my 18th birthday), and honestly I find the way 'native'/anglo Texans treat Mexicans (more properly, Hispanics, but over there everyone calls them Mexicans) to be probably slightly worse on average than the way French people treat people of African descent.
However, the French welfare state + my god our educational system is so fucked it's not even funny mean that it's possible to get certain pathological cases where an immigrant will move to France, live off the welfare state while railing against everything French (post-colonial hatred) and then use that sweet welfare money to plan and execute terrorist attacks.
I don't blame that one the innate character of French people though, just on badly designed social institutions. Our current welfare state was modified by well-meaning leftists who were aiming to make something more egalitarian, but instead made everything worse, and then modified by well-meaning neoliberals who were aiming to make something more efficient, but instead made everything worse, and now it's starting to look like a big ugly pile of legacy code written in Perl.