France is burning. But why? The obvious answer is that the country has accepted massive numbers of people, often young men of military age, from regions of the world where violence is more prevalent. Or, as the President of the US stated last weekend, "the migration of people from a completely different world, people with hate in their hearts, has destroyed this once-great country." This explanation certainly has grounds. France has indeed "imported the Third World," to use the formulation of the Vice President of the US. However, there is an interesting detail: in recent decades, France has accepted far fewer Third World immigrants compared to its larger neighbors, both in absolute numbers and proportionally.
Germany accepted many more immigrants – Why is it not in the same situation?
Over the past decade or so, since Third World immigration to Europe ceased being viewed merely as a "problem" and turned into a "crisis," no country recorded a larger influx of foreign-born residents than Germany. From 2015 to 2024, Germany welcomed just over 6 million immigrants, a figure corresponding to the total immigrants accepted by all other European Union nations combined. The share of its foreign-born population surged from 13.4% to 20.9%, registering an impressive rise. The overwhelming majority of these immigrants originated from non-EU nations. The United Kingdom followed with more than 4 million immigrants, while Spain ranked third, closely trailing the second country. In proportional terms, Malta recorded the largest increase over the past decade: the share of its foreign-born residents skyrocketed from 9% in 2013 to 32% in 2024. Luxembourg, Portugal, and Germany followed. Conversely, compared to almost all other European countries, the corresponding share in France increased relatively slowly, from 9.1% to 11.3%, albeit with a shift in calculation methodology. In other words, if the obvious explanation were correct, then Germany should be burning, as should Malta, the UK, and Spain, while France should be calm. But that is not happening.
Why, then, is France burning?
The crisis in France serves as a warning for the entire West. The prevailing view is that what is happening today in France might happen tomorrow in Germany, the day after in the UK, and next week across all of Europe. Concurrently, the conservative side argues that the French uprising must be taken as a warning for the United States. The argument is that all Western nations face similar problems and must prepare to confront internal tensions linked to immigration from Third World countries in the not-too-distant future. To be fair, there is some truth to this approach. The mass influx of populations from non-Western societies, without substantial efforts toward their cultural integration, generates significant problems. The West's crisis of self-confidence, ideologically driven aversion to its own historical heritage, and refusal to demand that newcomers integrate into host societies represent broader failures. These are failures that have already caused and will continue to cause severe social, cultural, and economic problems. However, France still differs from other Western countries. Its experience has no real equivalent—at least not in Europe.
The French migration crisis began in 1954, not 2015
For most of Europe, the "migration crisis" began in 2015, when more than a million refugees from the Middle East and North Africa sought asylum, fleeing wars and devastation. For France, however, the crisis had begun more than six decades earlier, in 1954, with the founding of Algeria's National Liberation Front (FLN). On November 1 of that year, the FLN issued a declaration favoring national independence and launched the Algerian Revolution, also known as the Franco-Algerian War. When the war officially ended eight years later, the Fourth French Republic had collapsed. Paris police had massacred, in a single day of crushing protests, up to several hundred Algerian immigrants. Tens of thousands of "harkis"—Muslim auxiliary soldiers who had fought alongside the French in Algeria—settled in France, while hundreds of thousands of economic refugees abandoned Algeria bound for French territory, although some returned periodically.
Furthermore, in 1968, six years after the war's end, France and Algeria signed an agreement granting Algerians special immigration and labor status. This agreement contributed to roughly doubling the Algerian population in France over the next 15 years. The result is that while France may face a lesser problem than other European countries regarding the number of newly arriving immigrants, it has a far more severe and deeply rooted issue with second- and third-generation immigrants, primarily from Africa. These populations might not pose a serious threat to the French state had they been substantially and consistently integrated. But that did not happen. Instead, they were largely isolated from the productive segments of French society. And herein lies France's distinctiveness: its policy toward African immigrants has a historical parallel, found, ironically, in Africa itself.
The historical example of South Africa and apartheid
Two of the most significant and long-term interventions of the National Party—the party of the white Afrikaner minority that designed and implemented the apartheid regime in South Africa—were the 1959 Bantu Self-Government Act and the 1970 Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act. Both were presented internationally as generous initiatives through which the government supposedly granted the country's Black population its own lands and political independence. In reality, however, the Bantustans—a term meaning roughly "places of the people"—constituted an attempt by the apartheid regime to remove the "surplus population" of Black people from areas controlled by whites and strip them of citizenship.
The goal was to eliminate their potential future claims on properties taken from them. Black South Africans were divided into groups based on simplistic ethnic and linguistic criteria and transferred to areas designated as "homelands" for each group. And when speaking of "transfer," this meant they were asked to leave without a real choice, regardless of their ties to the land, while subsequently being forced to move. When arriving in the new Bantustans, they were informed they were no longer South African citizens, but citizens of their new "homeland," which the National Party regime treated as a foreign political entity. The Afrikaners, descendants of 17th- and 18th-century Dutch settlers, granted their former Black compatriots a mere 13% of the territory, specifically the most arid and degraded tracts. This occurred despite Black people comprising roughly three-quarters of the population and despite the country possessing immense natural wealth and striking natural beauty. Paradoxically, gold, uranium, and other valuable natural resources were located almost exclusively in "white South Africa." The Bantustans served multiple purposes for the apartheid regime. The most important, however, was keeping the Black population in areas where the government could control and monitor them.
France and apartheid: The common treatment of "undesirable foreigners"
Throughout most of the 1960s and 1970s, the governments of France and South Africa maintained exceptionally close relations. France was the second most important foreign partner of apartheid South Africa and cooperated with it in nuclear research and energy. Perhaps one of the factors linking the two regimes was their shared distrust of populations they considered "surplus"—unwanted foreigners for whom, apparently, they found neither utility nor a civilized solution. The term "undesirable foreigners" has its roots in the mass detentions of the 1930s and the Vichy regime years, when camps like Rivesaltes hosted people the state deemed unsuitable or unwanted.
As modern French history historian Jeannette E. Miller points out, Rivesaltes was one of the most notorious among about 200 detention camps scattered across the French countryside during the "dark years." After the war, the French government reused the camp as an immigrant settlement center to house the harkis. It must be clarified that the harki housing camps did not serve the same purpose as Nazi transit camps and were not Bantustans. The comparison cannot be considered absolute. They were, however, harsh, repulsive, depressing, and designed to isolate the people living in them. They were used by the French government as a means of removing unwanted immigrants: Algerians whom the state felt obliged to settle in France while desiring no integration into its society. These specific camps served, in many respects, as the precursor to the now-notorious French suburbs, the banlieues.
The banlieues: France's ghettos and social isolation
The term banlieues is generally used for the suburbs of major French cities. In recent years, however, it is increasingly used with a derogatory connotation, describing the ugliness, poverty, and despair of Paris's suburbs, populated mainly by populations of African descent and Muslims. These areas were initially created as "utopias for workers." Over time, however, they transformed into zones of isolation for the descendants of African immigrants and other groups society refused to integrate. Concurrently, they remain largely invisible to the cosmopolitans of Paris. Their residents come to the forefront of public attention primarily when riots break out or terrorist acts occur. There, modern France keeps the people it refuses to see—its "surplus population"—while simultaneously seeking to keep it under control.
The banlieues persist as separate social zones because minorities exist and, as Spike Milligan observed, everyone has to be somewhere. Over the past decade and more, following terrorist attacks at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, American journalists frequently visit the banlieues to present residents' stories and highlight, as they claim, their beauty as centers of "multiculturalism." According to the author, the real goal of these journalistic features is to prove conservatives wrong when characterizing these specific suburbs as "no-go zones." In practice, however, these reports reveal something different: that France faces deep problems and has for years confronted the danger of the violence it experiences today. A characteristic example is George Packer's feature in The New Yorker magazine, describing living conditions in the French suburbs.
Daily life in the degraded suburbs of Paris
Ben Ahmed, 39, works as a liaison between residents and local government in Bondy, a suburb northeast of Paris in the area known as Department 93. For decades, the area was a bastion of the old working class and the Communist Party. Today, it is known for its Arab and African residents. For many Parisians, Department 93 symbolizes degraded public housing, crime, unemployment, and Muslim populations. France possesses many kinds of suburbs, but the term banlieues has acquired a negative connotation, pointing to poor neighborhoods dominated by immigrants. Within these suburbs lie the cités: massive concrete housing complexes built during the post-war decades, following Le Corbusier’s Brutalist architectural style. They were designed as worker utopias, but ended up constituting zones of concentrated poverty and social isolation. Despite their vibrancy, the banlieues feel detached from the city and France itself.
Parisians and tourists rarely visit them, while residents complain that journalists appear only to record burned cars and shootings related to drug trafficking. Many suburban residents, on the other hand, do not even consider visiting Paris. Compared to American slums, the banlieues feature relatively decent housing and safety levels. However, the psychological distance between Department 93 and the Champs-Élysées Avenue can feel unbridgeable—far greater than the distance between the Bronx and Times Square. Apartment blocks in the cités, often organized around a pharmacy, a convenience store, and a fast-food joint, seem turned inward. Many lack clear addresses, visible entry points, or parking spaces. The sense of detachment is amplified by the names of surrounding streets and schools, pointing to a historical France bearing minimal relation to the daily life of current residents.
Economic inequality is not the sole cause of violence
The banlieues are not Bantustans. Nothing else could truly compare to the organized and extreme oppression of the South African nationalist regime. However, according to the columnist, the similarities are striking and revealing. Conservative commentators criticized Sky News last weekend for attributing the violence in France to "economic inequality." This criticism has grounds, but only up to a point. The economic dimension unquestionably plays a major role in the anger and frustration spreading across the country. It is not, of course, the sole cause, but it cannot be deemed negligible. Equally important is the factor of inequality. No matter how angry and violent certain Black South Africans may be today toward their white compatriots, one can imagine how much greater frustration and violence would have been had the free world not exerted necessary pressure for the overthrow of apartheid.
The West's grand mistake: Integration does not happen by itself
The Western world genuinely faces dangers when accepting large numbers of immigrants unwilling to assimilate into their host societies. This, according to Stephen Soukup, is clear. However, the most important lesson from the current situation in France is that integration does not happen automatically. To protect themselves, Western states and their societies must reclaim their self-confidence as civilizations. And consequently, they owe it to themselves to make a much greater effort so that newly arriving immigrants and their children integrate both economically and culturally. The conclusion is that immigration policy cannot be limited to welcoming people and granting rights. Without a coherent and sustained policy of social, economic, and cultural integration, social fault lines risk solidifying and turning into a source of continuous tensions. France, with its historical past, isolated suburbs, and integration failures, serves as a cautionary example for the entire West.
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