France Fails Immigrants, Says Official Study

France is failing miserably to assimilate immigrants, a government commission said yesterday, painting what it called a "morbid picture" of ghettos, soaring unemployment, inadequate education, sexual inequality and rising fundamentalism in a "socially and professionally disadvantaged" community.

The High Council on Integration said in a damning report that an "enormous effort" was needed to assimilate adolescents of immigrant origin, who have been "abandoned" and constitute a "significant challenge for the republic".

The report comes as tensions mount over government plans to ban Islamic headscarves from schools, a move meant to protect France's strictly secular state, but which many fear will spark more resentment in its large Muslim community and hinder, rather than help, integration.

The council's report was necessarily short on figures because the French census cannot ask questions about race or religious belief. But according to a separate study by the sociologist Michele Tribalat, due to be published this week, France has just under 4 million Muslims, including the children and grand children of first-generation immigrants. More than 80% were originally from Algeria and Morocco.

Ms Tribalat's study shows that unemployment among second-generation Algerian immigrants is three to four times that among native French people.

But the council is against the introduction of positive discrimination or affirmative action. Instead, it favours "positive mobilisation and promotion" based solely on merit.

For such a policy to work, France must offer genuine equality of opportunity for all, it said. The state education system has a "major responsibility" to offer effective schooling for children from immigrant suburbs, and apprenticeships and work experience placements must be multiplied.