President Bush may not know the French word for entrepreneur,
but my friend Daniel does. He practically defines it. Daniel, a
Breton, has turned his language skills into a one-man international
business. He headed French/English translation and interpretation
services for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City, where
he still lives with his family. When the Tour de France needs an
interpreter, they call Daniel.
President Bush may not know the French word for entrepreneur, but my friend Daniel does. He practically defines it. Daniel, a Breton, has turned his language skills into a one-man international business. He headed French/English translation and interpretation services for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City, where he still lives with his family. When the Tour de France needs an interpreter, they call Daniel.
Some years ago, while teaching in Aix-en-Provence, Daniel asked his students what they wanted to do with their language training. This is a highly individualized, mobile skill suitable, indeed almost begging, for freelancing around the world. And yet 99 percent of his French students told him they hoped to find a regular job with a corporation.
The recent demonstrations in France have revealed the philosophical chasm between independent-minded Frenchmen like Daniel – who are more common abroad than at home – and the majority of his compatriots, who prefer security to freedom.
Protestors succeeded in forcing the government to repeal a law, known by its French acronym CPE, that would have allowed French employers to fire young workers at will in their first two years of employment. It sounds draconian to lefties, but the reality of the French workplace is that it is virtually impossible to fire anyone.
Predictably, this has made French employers skittish about hiring at all unless absolutely necessary. The result? High unemployment.
Much of that unemployment is among young North African immigrants – legal residents, in many cases citizens – who rioted last fall over the lack of opportunity. The CPE was created as a way to open up the French job market to these job seekers in particular.
French students, unions, and so-called intellectuals – risk-averse in a world where risk is unavoidable – would have none of it. But their demonstrations, coincident with pro-immigration demonstrations in this country, have revealed a perverse intellectual kinship between the left – both French and American – and the American far right.
There’s hardly a dime’s worth of difference between the impulse of the French working class to defend a calcified welfare state at the price of continued high unemployment among youth and minorities – up to 50 percent in some immigrant-dominated suburbs – and xenophobes in this country who would discourage immigration by criminalizing it. The common thread is the immigrants who want to work, and people who wish they would go away.
The American left has become complicit in this sham, stretching to the breaking point a comparison between pro-immigration protestors in this country and the mostly white protestors in France, who were effectively anti-immigrant.
Witness the left-leaning Huffingtonpost.com, which on Tuesday displayed side-by-side photos of demonstrations in Paris and Washington with the caption “power of the people” under both.
What people? In the March 26 Washington Post, Claire Berlinski writing from Paris described a recent encounter with two Arab immigrants in Paris working as movers. One was an unemployed radio journalist doing what immigrants do best: being entrepreneurial to get by.
“What do they think?” said her driver, referring with disdain to the protestors. “Do they think that jobs just fall from the sky?”
“It’s us they hurt,” said the second man, referring to immigrants like himself and their families.
This is the left’s blind spot: While American liberals cheered on the French defense of their impenetrable labor and welfare system, the people being hurt in France were the same people, immigrants, whose labor rights liberals in this country were fighting for against anti-immigrant groups like the Minutemen.
I’ve visited France dozens of times over 32 years. I’ve lived there, have friends and former in-laws there, and speak its language reasonably well. I love the French, and defended them when many in this country got all huffy because they, rightly, refused to back us in our little Iraq misadventure.
But in the matter of the CPE, the French are wrong. The employer tax breaks the government has proposed are a poor substitute, and the main consequence of the “victorious” protests that forced the government to back down will, ironically, be the continued unemployment of many of the young people who took part in them – not to mention the continued impoverishment of French immigrants. What will be the American liberal response to that?
Liberals, French and American, need to learn the French word for entrepreneur. I’m sure Daniel would be happy to teach them.
