Only the beginning of struggle with immigrant underclass

PARIS— Just two months ago, the French watched in horrified fascination at the anarchy of New Orleans, where members of America’s underclass were seen looting stores and defying the police in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

This month as rioters torch cars and trash businesses in the immigrantconcentrated suburbs of Paris, the images of wild gangs of young men silhouetted against the yellow flames of burning cars came as an unwelcome reminder for France that it has its own growing underclass. The country is only beginning to struggle with the fury of Muslims of North African descent who have found themselves caught for three generations in a trap of ethnic and religious discrimination. Even so, it is still low on the curve toward developing an entrenched, structural underclass — one that could breed extremism and lasting social problems. So far, while hundreds of cars and buses have been burned and dozens of businesses destroyed in violence that has spread to a dozen towns, most rioters appear to be teenage boys bent more on making the news than making a coherent political statement.

Olivier Roy, a French scholar of European Islam, said the danger is longrange. So far, he said, the attacks on the police and the torching of cars has less the character of a religious war than of “ a rite of passage.”

France has relied largely on costly measures to keep poor Muslims fed, housed and educated, but has not effectively addressed the social or political isolation they feel from job and housing discrimination, and has actually hurt their ability to define themselves as a political interest group. Affirmative action has been a taboo.

“ We’ve combined the failure of our integration model with the worst effects of ghettoization, without a social ladder for people to climb,” said Manuel Valls, mayor of the Paris suburb of Evry, which has been beset by violence.