Not good.

Editor,

In the post-WWII years, especially in the 1950's and 1960's, France imported a large number of laborers from North Africa for whom a step onto the bottom rung of European society was a big step up. That generation of immigrants was happy to live in crowded high-rises in the suburbs of Paris. The unspoken deal was that these workers were foreigners, not fully French, not first class. And it was fine. No violence. No hard feelings.

Then these people had kids. The kids were not foreigners. They were French. But not fully French as the original deal still held. Good jobs, slots in the best schools, first class was in many cases beyond these kids' reach, so their resentment grew. As did the uneasy feeling about them among the native French.

It is a difficult situation, a lot like the inequality in black-white relations in the USA. People of good will want everyone to belong and society to work, but it doesn't always turn out that way. Thus the vulnerability of 2nd- and 3rd-generation North African immigrant youth to jihadi radicalism. A terrible tragedy for themselves and everybody else.

Re: "One Suspect Surrenders in Attack on French Newspaper; Two Others at Large" (1/8/2015)