Better in their words…

Step up, folks. Most immigrants who have succeeded have had to do it.
============
WSJ 6/18/2016

Monaco

Mohed Altrad came into this world after his father raped his mother somewhere in the Syrian desert. He doesn’t know his date of birth or his age. He is likely in his 60s but can’t be sure. He doesn’t know where exactly he was born either. Today Mr. Altrad is the billionaire chairman of a global constructionservices firm, the owner of a rugby team and an Officer of the French Legion of Honor.

It’s a balmy afternoon when I sit down with Mr. Altrad at a luxury hotel in Monaco. The serene Mediterranean panorama outside is dotted with yachts, the kind that hire Michelin-starred chefs for onboard dining. This tiny principality is where Europe’s 1% flaunt their toys and trophies, speedy red Ferraris and supermodel companions.

Mr. Altrad is here to speak at the 2016 World Entrepreneur of the Year Forum, having won last year’s award. Mohed Altrad’s journey from cruel Arabia to the pinnacle of European business is a reminder of the power of capitalism, free trade and immigration to alter human destinies. At a time when many in Europe and the U.S. are rejecting the West’s classically liberal foundations, this quiet-spoken Bedouin remains a believer. Mr. Altrad’s tribe roamed the outskirts of Raqqa, Syria, which is today the capital of Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate. His childhood was primordial. “It’s the same conditions as Abraham,” he says. “Who was Abraham? Abraham was a Bedouin. What did he have? A lot of sand. So when people ask my age sometimes I reply, ‘Three-thousand years.’ ” His father was a tribal chieftain; his mother was a girl of 13 or 14. The chief raped his mother twice, and each time she bore him a son. Then she died. Mohed Altrad was the second son, and he was entrusted to the care of his grandmother, who resolved to make a shepherd of the boy. But the boy knew he wanted more than a life in the company of livestock.

“When you are 5 or 6 years old, you don’t think with your mind,” says Mr. Altrad. “You have emotions. It’s really—” here he taps his heart. “It’s like you’re an animal in a blind room with no door or windows, and all of the sudden you see a light, and you go.” The light he saw was a boys-only primary school in Raqqa.

At dusk, before his grandmother awoke, the young Mohed Altrad would trek 6 miles barefoot from their encampment to reach the school. His grandmother would chastise him when he returned home, he says, “but I did it until she accepted that I wanted to go to school.” A teacher one day noticed the Bedouin boy, invited him into the classroom and lent him books and pencils.

“Slowly, every little bit of light that I saw, every little means, I tried to use it,” says Mr. Altrad. Soon he was the best student in class, and when it came time to take the college-entrance exam, his were among the top scores nationwide. The Syrian regime granted him a modest scholarship to study in France—another glimmer of light. He ran toward it.

When Mr. Altrad moved to France, in the 1960s, Europe’s doors were open. Thousands of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa walked in. The Continent’s elites gave scant attention to assimilating these arrivals. They collected in grimy suburbs and ghettos, creating an easy-to-radicalize parallel culture that is now testing Europe’s liberal values.

Mr. Altrad’s biggest challenge wasn’t academic or professional success—that would come easily— but learning to integrate himself. “When you are born in Syria,” he recalls, “you grow with ideas which are not necessarily correct. For example, they educate you that you have to kill Jews wherever you find them. When I came to France I came with this idea.” But then he found himself learning alongside Jewish students at university, “and we became friends.”

That was the first of many small revolutions in the young Syrian’s mind. “When you are 16 or 17, it’s difficult to accept,” says Mr. Altrad. “You’re full of energy, you’re not prepared to accept a lot of things. But I had a chance to understand: If I want to live and stay in France, it’s not France that’s going to change for me—I have to change.”

He discarded his Bedouin robes in favor of a suit. He mastered French to the point where he now writes novels in his second language. And he rethought his own identity, remaking himself as a modern European. “I went through this process that was difficult, that is against nature,” he says. “It’s as if you put a cross against your past.”

His thinking about assimilation sounds harsh. But it would be familiar to the immigrants who came to the U.S. at the height of America’s open-borders policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Ellis Island alone processed more than a million new arrivals a year, and the expectation was that these immigrants would quickly become Americans. That meant discarding their cultural baggage in New York Harbor, often literally.

For Mr. Altrad assimilation paid off fast. He earned a doctorate in computer science and, after a few nine-to-five stints, caught the entrepreneurial bug. His first project was an early “portable” computer— it weighed 110 pounds—that he sold to a number of Arab airports for displaying the arrival and departure times of flights.

Thanks to hustle and frugality, he’d stored up a decent pot of capital by the mid-1980s. When a neighbor in his wife’s hometown of Montpellier, France, suggested that he purchase the assets of a bankrupt local scaffolding company, Mr. Altrad saw another glimmer of light. That company grew into the Altrad Group, a global firm offering scaffolding, cement- mixing and other construction services in 100 countries, including the U.S. It now has 17,000 employees world-wide and more than $2 billion in revenues.

Success has allowed Mr. Altrad to turn to public service. The cause he has taken up is promoting youth entrepreneurship, especially in France’s banlieues , the suburban ghettos that are home to an underclass of unassimilated Muslim immigrants. It is from the banlieues that radical Islamists often recruit jihadists, and the resulting insecurity and social incohesion has also been a boon to France’s illiberal far right.

The same pattern appears across Western Europe. Reversing it is the Continent’s biggest challenge. France has four to six million Muslim citizens, many of whom live in banlieues and “priority security zones” where even police tread with caution.

Joblessness in this demographic is above the already-high national unemployment rate of 10.5%. Students drop out of school before graduation because their families believe education is useless. Seven or more family members are cramped into tiny apartments, with only one breadwinner among them. Young men are idle. Political attachment to France is strained.

Mr. Altrad visits the banlieues frequently, and he has concluded that the only way out—for France and its Muslims—is integration. “This was really far from the French priority for the last 40 years,” he says. But he is heartened that the integration question has finally been propelled to the top of the national agenda in the wake of last year’s jihadist atrocities in Paris.

After Mr. Altrad was named World Entrepreneur of the Year last summer, President François Hollande invited him to the Élysée Palace to discuss these problems, and in October the government asked the businessman to create a new agency devoted to solving them. As France’s entrepreneurship czar, he will have to mobilize several government ministries. Making his first billion dollars was probably easier.

Mr. Altrad is all too aware of France’s Napoleonic folly—the urge to create a new agency or pass a new law to deal with every problem. “I know French culture probably better than most French,” he says, “because I went through this struggle to understand it.” His answer to the problem of integration is refreshingly Horatio Alger-esque: “time and work”—he means the latter in the sense of: “Get a job, young man!”

Mr. Altrad’s message to young French Muslims is a kind of no-excuses realism. He wants them to better understand their rights but also to see that the country isn’t as xenophobic as they imagine. “When you have a nation whose population is 20% nonnative French,” he says, “you can’t say it’s racist.”

The elite, meanwhile, must enact the pro-growth reforms needed to get the country working again. While the lure of jihadism isn’t reducible to economic stagnation, the idleness generated by high taxes, rigid labor laws and endless red tape doesn’t help. Bourgeois aspiration can be an antidote.

“The labor law,” Mr. Altrad says, “is a 10,000-page document. It tells you every imaginable detail. If you want to dismiss somebody because you have no more business, there is almost always a legal case, and the employees win 70% or 80% of cases.” Before they can recruit new talent, businesses must think six or seven years down the road. Very often they prefer not to hire.

Here, too, France is making slow progress. Mr. Hollande and his reformist prime minister, Manuel Valls, remain steadfast in their effort to loosen France’s 35-hour workweek, despite a month of strikes and violent rioting by the country’s militant labor unions. The 35-hour workweek is probably gone for good.

“Even if you’re not optimistic you have to be optimistic,” Mr. Altrad says, “because there is no other solution.” Meanwhile, more migrants wash up on Europe’s shores, most fleeing the horrors of his native Syria. European governments bargain over refugee quotas, but Mohed Altrad thinks the longterm answer lies elsewhere.

What he tells François Hollande, he says, is this: “If you want to find a solution for the Syrian problem, it’s easy: Don’t accept any Syrians— fine. But if you’re motivated to sort out the problem, you have to break ISIS.”

Mr. Ahmari is a Journal editorial writer based in London.