RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR.

The United States does a better job with immigration than does any other country in the world.
That's right, even with the U.S.' broken border, missed messages, recurring xenophobia and all the shouting on talk shows, other nations - particularly in Europe - are far worse in their treatment of immigrants.
Some, including Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Calif., would have us follow the lead of countries such as Germany and make it more difficult for children of the foreign-born to obtain citizenship.
It's a dreadful idea. It creates a population alienated from the mainstream and, by depriving them of citizenship rights, makes it easier for them to be preyed upon.
What's going on in France under new President Nicolas Sarkozy isn't much better. His country is in the forefront of the battle over immigration in Europe. Part of the reason is that the issue is on of Sarkozy's passions.
Actually, perhaps passion isn't the right word.
Patrick Weil, a senior fellow at the French National Research Center in Paris and an expert on French immigration and national identity, used a different word during a recent conference call with American and French reporters facilitated by the New York-based French-American Foundation.
"(Sarkozy's) obsession is to reduce the flow of immigrants coming legally from North Africa and Africa," said Weil, a critic of the French president, "and to reverse what he sees as an unbalanced level of legal flow tied to family reunification."
As Sarkozy sees it, according to Weil, France is taking in the wrong immigrants from the wrong countries - people who reject assimilation.
We hear the same complaint here in the United States about immigrants, particularly from Latin American countries, refusing to assimilate.
Sarkozy maintains his bias against the Africans, Weil said, "despite the fact that all the comparative studies that have been done show that France is very successful - much more so than other European countries - in the cultural integration of each group of migrants."
Weil noted that Sarkozy in recent speeches has even spelled out what he calls "the tragedy of Africa" - that the African man has "never really entered into history (nor) really launched himself into the future."
Rather, Sarkozy said, Africans live an existence where there is "never room for human endeavor nor for the idea of progress."
Obviously, that's ridiculous. It could also be called racist.
Sarkozy jumped back into the immigration debate last week when he announced that he opposed a blanket amnesty for illegal immigrants even while, in the same breath, acknowledging that the French economy needs foreign workers. It seems there are - to borrow a phrase - jobs the French won't do.
Nevertheless, Sarkozy has vowed to deport 25,000 illegal immigrants per year. And he wants to make immigration a top priority of the European Union when he takes over its presidency in July.
He even created a special ministry for immigration and national identity, making France one of the few countries in the world to have the equivalent of an immigration czar.
Yet one of Sarkozy's most ambitious ideas could be his worst: national origin quotas to allow for the selection of immigrants from specific geographic areas so as to limit the number of immigrants from certain parts of the world (read: Africa).
That sounds familiar. Country quotas were once a staple of U.S. immigration policy.
In the 1920s, Congress caved in to prejudice and created a quota system to limit the number of immigrants from "Southern Europe" (read: Italy). That historical wrong was righted in 1965 when Congress scrapped the quota system in favor of a policy emphasizing family reunification.
In the current immigration debate in the United States, some members of Congress have complained that Mexico dominates even the legal immigrant rolls.
Could a new quota system - one that limits the number of immigrants from Mexico and increases them from other parts of the world - be just around the corner?
Probably not, now that the Democrats have taken control of Congress. But the complaints haven't gone away, even if they are now limited largely to the rants of cable news demagogues.
Caving in to its own form of demagoguery, France is poised to make the same mistake that the United States did at the beginning of the 20th century.
What sense does that make? Instead of replicating what the United States has done wrong in shaping immigration policy, France would be better off trying to emulate the many things we got right.
Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a columnist and editorial board member of The San Diego Union-Tribune. E-mail: ruben.navarrette@uniontrib.com