In France, Discrimination on Upswing as Violence Smolders

PARIS: With a master's degree in business administration and two years of international work experience under his belt, Hamid Senni thought he had done enough to escape the stigma of his Arab roots. But only one company in France offered him a job - selling vacuum cleaners door to door.

On that sunny spring morning in 2002, Senni decided to leave France for good. Within a month, a headhunter in Brussels had lined up eight interviews in half a dozen countries. He turned down jobs with Oracle in Ireland and T-Mobile in Germany and took a €75,000-a-year position with BP in London before starting his own business - a diversity consultancy - in 2005.

The experience of Senni - a Frenchman of Moroccan descent who grew up in a grim housing project dubbed "the Bronx" in the south of France - is a cautionary tale for a country struggling to deal with aggression smoldering in its heavily immigrant areas.

The outbreak of violence last month in a rough neighborhood north of Paris recalled the 2005 riots that spread across France and prompted politicians to replay familiar arguments about improving education, housing and transport.

But as Senni and other second-generation immigrants who have turned their backs on France will say, none of this will help unless widespread discrimination in the job market is stamped out. And on that count, research suggests that the situation has not improved since 2005 - it has grown worse.

"Because everyone discriminates, you forget that it's illegal," said Senni, 32, who came to Paris last week on a business trip. "As long as the path to a job is blocked if you have the wrong name or postal code," he said, "we will have aggression in the suburbs."

A sociologist at the Sorbonne, Jean-François Amadieu, was the first to systematically document the problem. In 2004, he sent out 500 identical résumés in response to job ads in sales in the greater Paris area. The only difference was that some had Arab-sounding names and others traditional French ones.

Résumés from white male applicants with French names elicited five times more job offers than those that looked like they came from people of North African origin. In 2006, he repeated the exercise: This time, the ratio was 1-to-20.

"You might have expected that the ratio would improve after the riots put this issue onto the political agenda," Amadieu said. "This does show that 2005 did not make a decisive difference, if anything it did the opposite: It reinforced the stereotypes."

Amadieu cautioned that his research concentrated on the greater Paris area and the field of sales, where discrimination tends to be particularly pronounced. But the results of a parallel study examining discrimination against handicapped people in the capital were confirmed in nationwide surveys.

"Even if discrimination has not increased by a factor of four across France, you can safely conclude that there is no progress and probably an overall worsening," Amadieu said.

Years before Amadieu conducted his first large-scale résumé study, Iwad Koskossi had the same idea.

The 24-year-old son of a Moroccan mother and a Tunisian father, he grew up in a 16-story housing project near Villiers-le-Bel, the town where youths fought with the police and burned cars and public buildings on Nov. 25 and Nov. 26. The first in his family to finish high school, he obtained a vocational diploma in sales in 1999. After dozens of his job applications remained unanswered, he asked a white friend who had been in his class if he could use his name and photograph on his applications.

"Within a few weeks I had several responses," Koskossi recalled. "Of course I could not go to the interviews, but at least I knew what was going on."

In the five years after he obtained his diploma, he worked for only one company, as a security guard at Charles de Gaulle Airport, thanks to a recommendation by an uncle who was employed there. But in 2004, encouraged by stories of other French second-generation immigrants who had made found success in Britain, he packed his bags and moved to London.

Within two weeks, he had a job at the fast-food restaurant Nando's, near London Bridge in east London.

"I'm not saying there is no racism in Britain, but at least in the job market there is a lot less of it," Koskossi said during a recent visit in France.

It does not help that France has a broader problem creating enough jobs for its young people. Unemployment has fallen from 9.8 percent in 2005 to 8.1 percent, which is still higher than Britain's 5.2 percent or the 7 percent average rate in the European Union, according to the latest EU figures published in October. But in the under-26 category the jobless rate surges to about 20 percent and in the dingiest suburbs it can reach over 40 percent.

Vowing to fight discrimination, President Nicolas Sarkozy has broken with tradition by appointing several people from ethnic minorities to his cabinet. Rachida Dati, the daughter of North African immigrants, is the justice minister. Fadela Amara, a Muslim of Algerian descent, is in charge of urban affairs.

A few large companies, whose recruiting practices have come under scrutiny by the media, have also stepped up their efforts to increase diversity among their staff. Since 2005 there is an official discrimination watchdog with enforcement powers.

Senni's consultancy, a two-man operation called Vision Enabler, counts several high-profile names in London and Paris among its clients, including L'Oréal, BP and Morgan Stanley.

But Senni says many companies, especially smaller ones, are happy to hide behind the French practice of banning statistics on race and ethnicity. Human resource executives are arguing that without such statistics they cannot evaluate their diversity.

"This is an excuse," Senni said. "You don't need any statistics to see that the security guard is black, the girl on reception is North African, the secretary is a woman and most of those who count are white men. I tell my clients: Compare your office to the subway: If it looks very different, you need to act."

In a follow-up study on résumé response rates conducted last year throughout France, Amadieu found that discrimination was more pronounced the higher the level of education that was sought by an employer. That has been sending a stark message to the suburbs: Educated youths increasingly consider leaving the country, social workers report. Others are less motivated to continue with their studies, Senni said.

"In 2005 we had firebombs; this year it was guns," he said. "What's next?"