The Choice of Ignorance: The Debate on Ethnic and Racial Statistics in France

A researcher or a journalist trying to compare the situation of ethnic and racial minorities in the United States and in France immediately confronts a crippling obstacle. The concept of ‘ethnic and racial minority’ as such is not used in France. This is not simply a matter of vocabulary –something the French typically like to argue about; the problem rather lies in the very incomparability of populations that one is talking about. Many of the categories that do exist in political discourse and public debate can of course be found in statistics. But there are no data describing the situation of minorities in France that could be compared with those produced in the United States. This state of affairs in French statistics – gathering has been the subject of major criticism for some 20 years now; it has gotten to the point that it has triggered a controversy of rare violence between those that would like to see statistics take into account the diversity of the population and those who denounce the danger that such statistics might pose of ethnicizing or racializing society. The media focus on the contentiousness of this debate has been such as to sometimes lose sight of the very existence of discrimination and the flaws of the Republican model that are at the root of the controversy in the first place

Migrating concepts: Immigrant integration and the regulation of religious dress in France and Canada

Religion in general, and Islam in particular, has become one of the main focal points of policy-making and constitutional politics in many Western liberal states. This article proposes to examine the legal and political dynamics behind new regulations targeting individual religious practices of Muslims. Although one could presuppose that church-state relations or the understanding of secularism is the main factor accounting for either accommodation or prohibition of Muslim religious practices, I make the case that the policy frame used to conceptualize the integration of immigrants in each national context is a more significant influence on how a liberal state approaches the legal regulation of individual practices such as veiling. However, this influence must be assessed carefully since it may have different effects on the different institutional actors in charge of regulating religion, such as the Courts and the legislature. To assess these hypotheses I compare two countries, France and Canada, which are solid examples of two contrasting national policy frames for the integration of immigrants

The Coproduction of National Models of Integration: A View from France and the Netherlands

The notion of national models of integration is a very popular one in comparative migration studies as well as in the making of integration policy. A key trait of such national models is that they assume policies to be formulated and coordinated in a strongly state-centred way, reflecting national institutional legacies, national politics and public perceptions of national identity. In this respect, the literature distinguishes, for instance, the French republican model, the British race-relations model and the Dutch multicultural model. In this chapter two such models, those of France and the Netherlands, are described, analysed and critically assessed. The conclusion is that national models of integration are an inappropriate tool for the comparative study of integration inasmuch as the objective of such research is to assess the success or failure of a national approach to integrating migrants. The notion of national models is tainted by normative (if not moral) connotations that hinder the ability of social scientists to address empirical reality