Leadership Quote by Bobby Jindal

Jindal’s line reads like a tidy diagnosis, but it’s really a political framing device: riots become less about policing, poverty, or state legitimacy and more about a failure of identity. “Demonstrate” carries courtroom confidence, as if complex unrest has delivered a single, legible verdict. The phrasing turns a volatile event into an evidence exhibit for a broader argument about assimilation.

The subtext is doing heavier work than the surface claim. By specifying “second and third generation immigrants,” he signals that time has supposedly run out; if you’re born and raised in the country and still “do not consider themselves” national, the problem must be cultural, not structural. That moves responsibility away from institutions and onto communities and individuals. It also quietly treats belonging as a self-certified feeling rather than a two-way contract shaped by housing segregation, labor markets, schools, and everyday discrimination. The rhetorical sleight is that exclusion can look like choice.

“French, German, or English” isn’t just a list; it’s a shorthand for “the West,” with “English” (a nationality) standing in for “British” (a state identity) - a small slip that reveals how easily national identity is flattened into a cultural essence. In the context of American debates over immigration and “integration,” Jindal is importing Europe’s anxieties as a cautionary tale: don’t become them. It’s a message aimed less at Paris than at U.S. voters, positioning multiculturalism as a security risk and assimilation as preventative policy. The appeal works because it offers a simple villain - insufficient loyalty - at a moment when complexity is politically inconvenient.