FRANCE: The French National Assembly voted yesterday to extend the state of emergency until February 21st, 2006. The Senate will follow suit today.
The law is being passed even as its raison d'être, nearly three weeks of rioting in France's immigrant suburbs, is dissipating. In all of France, 215 vehicles were burned overnight on Monday, compared to 284 and 374 the preceding two nights.
In presenting his draft law to the National Assembly, the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, said the three-month prolongation was necessary despite "a progressive return to calm" because "nothing has been definitively settled".
President Jacques Chirac had struck a conciliatory note in his television address on Monday night, telling "the children of the difficult neighbourhoods" that "they are all the sons and daughters of the Republic".
But Mr Sarkozy continues to take a confrontational stand, blurring the distinction between immigrant youths in general and rioters. "Between 75 and 80 per cent of the people arrested in the riots were already known to police," he announced yesterday. "They were already delinquents."
Mr Chirac spoke of the "poison of discrimination", but proposed only voluntary measures to counter it.
It is nearly impossible to quantify discrimination in France because the National Commission on Computer Science and Liberties (CNIL) - which reviews scientific research before publication - forbids surveys based on ethnic origin.
Le Monde has nonetheless identified four studies that managed to circumvent regulations since 1992.
The most recent, a 35-page study published by the National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) five days before the riots started on October 27th is entitled Inter-generational mobility and the persistence of inequality. It shows how unemployment dogs immigrant families from one generation to the next.
The reasons immigrants lose or cannot find jobs go beyond training, social origin, age or family composition. "All other factors being equal, the gap attains impressive levels for non-European immigrants and remains wide for subsequent generations," the INED report says.
"Inheriting a non-European origin constitutes a handicap on the job market that is not erased by obtaining French nationality."
For example, a chart published by INED, but taken from the national statistical institute INSEE's 1999 study on family histories, shows that first-generation Algerian male immigrants had an unemployment rate of 29.6 per cent; the second generation 23.2 per cent.
Among sub-Saharan Africans, 26.7 per cent of first-generation male immigrants were unemployed, compared with 19.2 per cent of the second generation.
Although solid statistics are not available, Le Monde concluded that north African Arabs and Africans are confined to "ethnic niches" in employment, with a high percentage working in construction, hotels, as security guards, in cleaning and maintenance, social work and as nurses' aides. They are also more likely to hold state-subsidised positions and to work under short-term contracts.
Studies by INSEE and INED showed that 32.5 per cent of high-ranking civil servants are themselves the children of civil servants, and that a French child of foreign parents has only one-fifth the chance of becoming a civil servant as a French person of French origin.
More than 20 per cent of immigrant families from north Africa and Turkey live below the poverty level of €602 per month, compared to 6.2 per cent of the overall population.
These disadvantages have become endemic, almost hereditary. But Azouz Begag, the minister for equal opportunity, whose parents immigrated from Algeria, has asked French minorities to keep a sense of perspective.
"All these kids who are burning their neighbours' cars," he told Europe 1 radio station, "I tell them: go to Africa. Go to South America. You'll see real poverty, real hardship. And when you return, you'll kiss the ground of this country."