The flames of disintegration

Which would you rather have in your capital city: a terrorist attack in the centre or a weeklong riot on the outskirts? After the experience of last July, most Londoners would probably be tempted to opt for the latter.

The damage inflicted by the Tube and bus bombings far exceeds the cost of the recent mayhem in Paris's eastern suburbs.

On the other hand, the perpetrators of the 7/7 bombings could be counted on the fingers of one hand. By contrast, no one knows just how many young men took to the streets of Paris last week, but there were certainly hundreds.

Britain and France face roughly the same problem at the moment. But there is good reason to think that France's is bigger.

Just what is the problem? Nicolas Sarkozy, the brazenly ambitious French interior minister, denounced the rioters as "scum" and "thugs," having earlier vowed to "clean up" the areas where the violence took place.

This was the cue for his foes on the left to blame the trouble on Sarkozy's heavy-handed approach to policing. Meanwhile, his foes on the right pointed the finger of blame at immigration. After all, the cars are burning in suburbs where immigrant communities predominate.

Sarkozy is, in fact, engaged in a clever piece of political triangulation. Having already bid for immigrants' support with offers of affirmative action programmes and votes for non-citizens who are long-term residents, he now needs to send a signal to the French right that he also knows how to be tough.

The real question is whether this mix of carrots and sticks is a credible cure for a divided city.

The problem is not immigration per se but a failure of integration. France has the highest foreign-born population of any European country more than 10 per cent. Yet this is a legacy of past immigration, not present.

The French have a low immigration rate and are notably unsympathetic to those who seek political asylum. These days, most newcomers are joining family members who have been in France for years, if not decades.

The trouble is, they are moving to ghettoes with miserable economic prospects. The unemployment rate among foreign-born residents is more than twice the national average, which is already high enough at more than 9 per cent.

Immigrants are also heavily overrepresented in French jails.

Revealingly, the rioters who have so far been arrested are nearly all the sons and grandsons of immigrants. Their life stories are sorry chronicles of educational underachievement, unemployment and petty crime in benighted enclaves.

Immigration need not mean social exclusion. Most of the people who move from poor countries to rich countries do so with the best of intentions to work hard and make a better life for themselves and their children.

Real gusto

Compared with Europe, the United States has long excelled at integrating newcomers. Not so long ago I was at a school in southern Texas, not far from the Mexican border.

The day began with the entire class singing a ditty that went like this: "I am proud to be an American, be an American, be an American / I am proud to be an American, living in the USA OK!" Deeply corny, no doubt. But these little kids sang albeit in distinct Latino accents with real gusto.

Longtime Americans take for granted the language and civics tests that would-be Americans have to take. But they're not easy.

One question in the official Guide to Naturalisation is: "Who said, 'Give me liberty or give me death?' " I had no idea it was Patrick Henry. My favourite sample question is: "Who helped the Pilgrims in America?"

The answer to that one is: "The American Indians/Native Americans" a fine example of the American habit of accentuating the positive.

The problem in Europe is partly economic. In free-market America, immigrants get jobs; they are not much more likely to be unemployed than workers born in the US.

But the second problem is that Europeans do not try hard enough to make immigrants integrate culturally. In Britain, an English-language test for would-be citizens was introduced only last year, and only last week did they begin testing for knowledge of "Life in the UK".

The irony is that it is Americans, not Europeans, who are consumed with worry about the social consequences of immigration.

Only last week, Dick Lamm, the former Democratic governor of Colorado, gave an extraordinary speech in Washington prophesying the "destruction of America" through multilingualism, multiculturalism and "victimology".

They are, of course, right to worry. The United States needs to safeguard its tradition of effective economic and cultural integration. But as my own immigration to the United States proceeds, I tend to worry much more about Europe.

Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.