For days, riots have engulfed France as protesters, agitators, and opportunists alike point to the rising cost of living, deteriorating public schools, and broader economic woes as they set their country ablaze, loot stores, and clash with police.
Conservatives have been quick to blame mass migration from the third world, but they are wrong. What is unfolding in France is a distinctly first-world problem: the collision of progressive economics with a culture of entitlement.
France has FREE health care, paid parental leave, paid family leave, FREE child care, FREE preschool, 5 weeks paid vacation, a 35 hour work week, generous unemployment and housing benefits, and heavily subsidized higher education. Everything the left says they want AND THEY'RE STILL PROTESTING AND BURNING SHIT DOWN.
— Rob Schneider 🇺🇸 (@RobSchneider) October 19, 2026
First, we need to distinguish what is happening in France from the issue of mass migration. Europe has cultivated a culture of entitlement, the expectation that government owes every individual economic prosperity and well-being, and that culture compounds the problems of mass migration.
Imagine those same migrants arriving in a European country without any welfare state, responsible for their own lives, their own economic well-being, and their own choices. The bargain would be clear: if they come, they must come prepared to work and build a new life, not to have that life financed by someone else. Many might decide not to come, but those who did would have to embrace the work ethic and determination similar to the immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island in the early 20th century.
Newcomers are not responsible for the culture of entitlement they encounter, but they certainly learn to take advantage of it. They arrive from their home countries to find a new set of rules: expansive rights, privileges, and benefits, with too little insistence on corresponding responsibilities. When authorities excuse intimidation, overlook vandalism, or hesitate to prosecute violence out of fear of appearing intolerant, those willing to exploit that hesitation learn a simple lesson: the boundaries are negotiable, and they will not be held responsible for their actions.
Think of children placed in the care of indulgent grandparents rather than their stricter parents. Only here, the indulgence is not extra television or another handful of candy. It is the freedom to intimidate neighbors, damage businesses, or disrupt public life without meaningful consequences.
People should hardly be surprised to see these kinds of acts across Europe when governments permit greater freedom and demand less responsibility from a select few than from everyone else. The weakest-willed among us would be no better in the same situation. That is the point: the problem is not merely who is arriving in these countries, but what behavior the societies receiving them reward.
And what they reward brings us back to their experiments in progressive economics. Europeans are entitled to free healthcare, entitled to the profits of their corporations, entitled to low prices through price controls, entitled to a share of even American companies’ profits to subsidize their welfare states, and entitled to the labor of future generations left to pay for today’s overspending. That same sense of entitlement has spilled into the legal realm: Europeans are entitled not to be offended by someone else’s speech, and minorities are entitled to preferential treatment as compensation for centuries of colonialism.
The French riots are the culmination of decades of entitlement. We wonder why, with all this free stuff, the French still act this way. But a spoiled brat never concludes that he has been given enough; he concludes that he deserves more. We wonder why we saw echoes of that attitude during the 2020 BLM riots and see them in anti-ICE riots today. The common thread is not immigration. It is catering to spoiled individuals who believe that they, and anyone whose cause they embrace, are entitled to what belongs to others.
Even if we removed every third-world immigrant tomorrow, neither America nor Europe would be cured of that problem overnight. Congratulations: you removed some people who believe they are entitled. You did not remove the entitlement. The deeper problem is an attitude cultivated in the West, not merely the people who arrive and learn to take advantage of it.
