The deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore, two boys electrocuted while hiding from the police in an electrical sub station in France on Oct. 27, ignited years of tension from racism, poverty, segregation and unemployment into riots.

The French government has imposed curfews and cancelled public meetings, and French police have been doing house-to-house searches to curb the public disturbances occurring in many areas of the country in the past few weeks.

Rioting may pose an immediate threat to French citizens, but two ISU professors said decades of unrest lie at the heart of the matter.

Hsain Ilahiane, associate professor of anthropology, said many factors set the stage for the French civil disturbances.

World War II destroyed much of Europe, Ilahiane said. During the reconstruction process there was a shortage of labor, and France compensated by importing labor from its colonies in North Africa, an area that used to be under French control, he said. Since then, immigration tensions have been building between the French and North Africans.

Ilahiane said Arabs and Africans are given few opportunities in France.

“They have been marginalized by the French government or society,” he said.

There is a lack of opportunity for immigrants, he said, and unemployment is very high in these communities.

“Unemployment tends to breed crime,” he said. “It tends to breed deviant behavior in the sense of drugs.”

There is 10 percent unemployment in most areas, but in the suburbs, which have a high immigrant population, unemployment is as high as 40 percent, he said.

“They’ve been in dire straights,” he said. “The death of those two youth, in my opinion, was the last straw to break the camel’s back.”

Jean-Pierre Taoutel, senior lecturer in foreign language and literatures, lived in Paris for many years and said the riots may have resulted from problems of integration.

“Those riots are clearly an expression of the wrong immigration integration politics,” he said.

Politicians use immigration as a political game and never focus on how to solve the problem, he said.

Ilahiane said that while he was visiting France he always had to carry his identification papers. To control illegal immigration, police officers could ask him for his ID at any time, he said.

Laura Swan, junior in philosophy who is currently teaching in France, said the cultural environment of France plays a role in sparking these kinds of disturbances.

“I think that this is the way that the culture has brought them up,” she said. “When you don’t like something, you go on strike. If something isn’t your problem, or might not be your problem, you do a big shoulder shrug. Thus, if you want someone to realize that it is their problem when they might be able to say it isn’t, you have to make a big scene.”

Swan said she lives with a French woman who teaches at the same French school who told her, “This is just another one of those things in French life that you have to get used to, like the strikes. Any time a young person gets killed and the police are involved, it causes a great uproar, and that is what is happening now.”

Ilahiane said a fundamental difference between France and the United States comes through in immigration issues. Ilahiane said he asked a former colleague, who had gotten his degree in Toulouse, France, what felt different about living in the United States after living in France. His colleague replied, “Man, I don’t feel like a foreigner here.”

Ilahiane said the racism in France and the racism in the United States are also very different.

“The U.S. is a land of immigrants,” he said. “In France, people don’t think of themselves as a land of immigrants.”

Another French student at Iowa State said media coverage made the riots seem more extreme than they really were.

“Only a few people were involved in the burning of cars,” said Stephan Outrey, senior in computer science from France. “It’s because of the TV, it’s acting like a loop and amplifies it.”

Aurelien Rousseau, an undeclared graduate student from Grenoble, France, said he thinks the media attention on the riots might finally cause things to change in France.

“I think it’s a good thing it exploded,” he said, adding that he didn’t think riots in general were a good thing. “It could have been worse in the future.”