Toronto Star: For France’s immigrant outcasts, despair leads to dogma

To academics and civil-society groups that measure integration policies, France is seen as lagging in its efforts. Researchers at Queen’s University in Kingston, who oversee the Multiculturalism Policy Index, rate France 2 out of 8, the same score it had in 2000.
The Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) gives France an overall score of 51 out of 100, down slightly from 2007, and criticizes French laws that make non-European Union residents ineligible for about 7 million jobs in both the public and private sectors. France allows for dual citizenship, which is considered a progressive policy that helps immigrants retain their roots as they put down new ones. But on most measures, the country falls flat. 
For instance, France — which has always repudiated the idea of multiculturalism — is officially blind to minority groups. Everyone is quite simply French. Therefore, equity or affirmative-action programs for under-represented groups don’t exist. France has also been making it harder to obtain citizenship, with stricter administrative and language proficiency requirements. Immigration now entails an official “contract” that requires immigrants to agree to France’s secular and social values, and, if necessary, take language classes. When it’s time to renew their resident cards, their efforts are reviewed. Migrants also have to take a civic integration course, although compared to the Dutch one, it’s short and simple. The result of these conditions is that the number of immigrants granted citizenship dropped from more than 108,000 in 2009 to 66,000 in 2011...
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