by Naoya Suizu

Immigrants often become the factor of many problems for some countries.  Particularly, the trigger for the problems is the differences of culture.  If culture is different, various aspects such as the way of life, thoughts and so on are sometimes very different.   Although immigrants have their own culture of their country where they were born, the country they immigrated exists culture all their own.  As a result, by bringing about the gap between the two cultures, big problems are likely to happen.  To avoid such cultural frictions, some countries try to assimilate immigrants with themselves as policies.  Assimilation is the process becoming a part of a country or group and some countries aim at enhancing national safety and unification by the policies of assimilation.

As the typical country carry out the policies of assimilation, we can mention France.  In France, a presidential election hold just now and Sarkozy and Hollande battle as powerful candidates for president.  This election will decide the direction of French policies from now on and many problems such as dealing with Europe crisis and nuclear power will start to argue. At the same time, French think the problem about immigrant as one of the big problems.  In these days, French become more interested in this problem because a French man killed some Jews by gun. By this case, French begin to think racial prejudice and the relationship with immigrant and pay more attention to policies each candidate declares about immigrant.

Originally, since the founding of France, France has practiced the policy of assimilation for immigrants.  By this policy, immigrants are given the equal right with French based on French ideas such as freedom, equality and philanthropy.  As a result, immigrants gradually increased in France and after two world wars, more immigrants settled down because France opened the door positively to get immigrants for labor.  However, this stream has changed and French started to regard most immigrants as the robber of French jobs and the existence of bringing about bad incidents.  Also, immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants, complained of French discrimination and inequality and it happened many riots to protect their own culture in France.