France's Rioting Has Nothing To Do With Immigrants -- And Everything To Do With Prices
Fire on Paris street during rioting last week
Polls being what they are, Republicans and their supporters must be feeling a bit like the condemned Frenchmen who rode to the guillotine during the Reign of Terror. It's fitting, then, that they are seizing on unrest in France as a desperate campaign gambit. "The Riots in France Are a Warning for America," declared The Federalist. And what is the lesson? "Mass immigration will split your country in two, and the two sides will eventually go to war."
Rep. Keith Self, chairman of the Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Europe, had the script down pat:
"They've been allowing this to happen for years and years, so they are reaping what they sowed. ... We're also trying to get a handle on our mass migration consequences, just like France should have done years ago. That's why I say this is a lesson to America. We are watching the future of America in France and the U.K., frankly."
So did Speaker Mike Johnson:
"France is descending into chaos because they wanted OPEN BORDERS — just like the socialist Democrats in America. What we are witnessing is a chilling warning for all Americans of what happens if the radical Marxist insurgent left gets their way."
JD Vance warned that "This is the future congressional Democrats seek for your country."
Naturally, President Donald Trump picked up the baton, telling reporters that the French protests were about "immigration, not schools," and posting:
"France is burning! The immigration of people from an entirely different world, people with hatred in their hearts, has shattered that once great country. Close your Borders and take control, before it is too late!"
Back in reality, there is no evidence that the French protests and riots have anything at all to do with immigration. There has been Islamist violence in France over the years, perpetrated by immigrants or children of immigrants, perhaps most famously the attack on the Paris offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015 and the horrific Nice truck attack the following year that killed 86.
But that's not what's happening today, and no desperate eagerness by American Republicans to hijack these protests for their flailing campaigns can change that. There is no data on the ethnicity or color of the thousands of people arrested in the past week — France doesn't keep such records. Students in the Paris suburbs were protesting for weeks before the violence started. Similar protests have spread to Lyon, Marseilles, Lille, Bordeaux, and many other smaller cities and rural areas — and so did the violence. What originated with students protesting poorly equipped high schools expanded to farmers and labor unions.
Some of the rioters are dissolute young men who were itching to pick a fight with the police, but the original demonstrators were students complaining about the long-running underfunding of French schools. Others who joined are furious about the price of gasoline and diesel, and the high cost of living in general. So a more likely cause of the unrest in France isn't immigration but Trump's half-baked decision to attack Iran without buy-in from Congress. In fact, the high cost of fuel and associated inflation is causing unrest in other European countries including Italy, Portugal, Belgium and Albania. (The Albanians were already displeased by a corruption scandal linked to a resort development project by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.)
The protests in France do bear a lesson for the United States, but it's not the one the GOP prefers. France has a weakness for a la barricade. Princeton's David A. Bell quotes an old saying: "While the United States has three branches of government, France has four: the executive, the legislative, the judiciary, and the street." In 2018, the country was nearly paralyzed by the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protests over fuel taxes. But today's protests and riots are different. They have an end-of-an-era feel.
People are demanding better services and lower prices but are unwilling to make the trade-offs those things demand. France's finances are in terrible shape, the effect of low growth and high spending on entitlements. France has been a poor place to start a business for decades. A 2012 "millionaire's tax" failed and was abandoned.
Efforts to deal with the crushing burden of pensions for the elderly — for example, Emmanuel Macron's push to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 — have been met with fierce resistance. France has been borrowing to cover its costs, but the bond markets are having their say, charging France more to borrow than Italy or Greece. France now spends more to service its debt than it spends on defense or education. And because America is stepping back from global leadership, the demands on France's budget for defense will only increase.
Lenders take account not just of a country's debt to GDP ratio but also its political stability and likelihood to repay its debts. When you look at France, you see rising support for Marine Le Pen, a right-wing extremist who is as soft on Putin as she is tough on immigrants. But on the important matter of France's fiscal health, she makes Trumpian promises of cutting aid to immigrants while promising to reverse Macron's increase in the retirement age. Swell. No hope of economic sanity there.
Over on the left, Jean-Luc Melenchon has made noises about repudiating part of France's debt, a fast road to Venezuelan-style collapse. There are more centrist candidates who offer more realistic reforms, but none seems to have political traction at this moment.
The United States is not, for a variety of reasons, in quite as bad shape economically as France, but the GOP, once supposedly the party that at least paid lip service to the problem of our national debt (are you out there, Paul Ryan?) has become utterly blithe about economic realities under Trump. Not only have his tariff and war policies raised prices, but his irresponsible tax cuts combined with ballooning spending have saddled us with unsustainable debt. Like France, we are now spending more on debt service than on defense.
Lenders, by nature or necessity an unsentimental bunch, don't seem to trust us more than they trust France to make sensible governing choices about taxes and spending. In fact, they trust us less. France is on fire, yet their 10-year bond yield only recently surpassed five percent, while as recently as last month we were being charged 5.2 percent. Potential lenders see a nation beclowned by repeated government shutdowns, threats to default on debt (by not raising the debt ceiling), and now in Trump 2.0, attacks on the integrity and independence of the Federal Reserve. It's impossible to say with specificity how threats to conquer Greenland, Iceland and Canada, the reality of abandoning Ukraine and sucking up to Putin, and wild swings of tariff policy play into perceptions of U.S. stability, but it can't be reassuring.
The lessons from France have nothing to do with immigration and irrepressible civil war. The primary lesson is: Don't spend more than you earn. Don't elect idiots who know little of economic reality and care less. Don't impose inflation-triggering tariffs on your allies. Don't start wars you have no idea how to win. Don't tell yourself fairy tales about immigrants causing all your problems when you fail at the most basic tasks of governing.
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- France promises ‘massive’ police presence this weekend as cities impose more curfews after protest violence | CNN ›
- The rioting across France is a symptom of a much larger public and political crisis | CNN ›
- Paris extends curfew as Marseille and Lyon ban protests after riots ›
- Dramatic images show violent unrest sweeping across France ›
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- How France’s worst rioting in years erupted and how the government responded ›
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