The accepted view is not just that the American melting pot differs from European separatism, but that the largest bloc of our immigrant residents is itself quite different — Christian Mexicans who trek across a common 2,000-mile unfenced border, eagerly looking for work. France’s Muslim immigrants bring with them age-old, clash-of-civilizations baggage dating from Poitiers in the 8th century to the 20th-century French colonial war in Algeria. In contrast, Mexico was colonized by European Christians — and we have had more or less stable relations with the Mexican government for over a century. Moreover, even illegal-alien drug smugglers and gangbangers are not terrorists; we do not fret about their potential sympathy for radical Islam. And the rioters outside of Paris were almost all males, apparently embracing strict gender separation — antithetical to French culture, and utterly foreign to Mexican immigrant men and women, who cross our border indistinguishably.

All’s Not Well

Yet such contrasts are not the entire story. For despite the many differences, America is not immune from all the destructive social and cultural forces now tearing at the seams of French society. Hundreds of thousands of first-generation illegal aliens currently live in Los Angeles and rural California in what are, in effect, segregated communities. In many cases, they are no more integrated — and no less alienated — than those in the French suburbs. Instead, these immigrants comprise an entire underclass without sufficient language skills, education, or familiarity with their host country to integrate successfully into society, much less to pass on capital and expertise to ensure that their children are not condemned to perpetual menial labor.

Spanish has become the de facto language for many communities in the southwest U.S. in the same way that Arabic dominates the French suburbs. Mexico City newspapers air the same sort of historical gripes and peddle the same kind of myths as Arab fundamentalists, who drug their poor, uneducated expatriates with stories of al-Andalus and a restored caliphate that will spread once again from southern Europe to the Euphrates.