This summer, while the immigration debate broiled in the U.S., the government of France launched a countrywide crackdown on the Roma, an ethnic group with origins in South Asia or Eastern Europe, that drew criticism from both the United Nations and the Roman Catholic Church. And, in a “rare” move, the European Parliament called on France this week to suspend its expulsion of the Roma, accusing French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government of “targeting Roma as a group” and “ignoring essential European human rights guarantees.”

The total number of Romanian and Bulgarian Roma deported from France so far this year has reached 8,313. The French government has defended its actions by pointing out that the deportations are necessary to combat crime and that they have paid about 300 per expulsion.

However, courts in Lille have stated that many Roma deportation cases “did not meet the legal standard of a real and immediate threat.” A court in Nantes ordered the state to pay damages to the 29 Roma concerned. Critics have described the ramped up expulsions “as part of a drive by Sarkozy to revive his popularity before 2012 elections and divert attention from painful pension reforms and spending cuts.”

The Roma represent the largest ethnic minority group in the European Union and, throughout history, they have been the target of persecution. The immigration debate in Europe is by no means limited to neither the Roma nor to France. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has praised France’s expulsion of Roma as a model to follow and accused the left of wanting an “invasion of foreigners.” Muslim, African, and Latin American immigrants have also been common targets of European xenophobia.

All of this is despite the fact that the European continent’s population is aging so fast that it desperately “needs young newcomers to fill the gaps.” Nonetheless, a survey released this week by the Financial Times found that many Europeans have a negative view of immigration:

Ultimately, during this modern era of globalization, almost every nation — including the U.S. — is grappling with the immigration issue in one way or another. But Europe’s harsh response to the influx of newcomers doesn’t diminish what is happening in Arizona, nor does it make it okay. If anything, immigrant-receiving nations throughout the world are keeping a careful eye on the U.S. to see how the longtime “nation of immigrants” deals with the issue. And rather than adopting the marginalizing policies that have aggravated Europe’s immigration woes, the U.S. would be better off leading the way in building a humane immigration system that’s in tune with today’s modern global economy.

Today, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a closely watched four-year-old, anti-immigrant city ordinance that made it illegal to rent to or hire undocumented immigrants in the town of Hazleton, PA. Latino and civil rights groups led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) successfully argued that the ordinance is preempted by federal law. The court concluded:

It is, of course, not our job to sit in judgment of whether state and local frustration about federal immigration policy is warranted. We are, however, required to intervene when states and localities directly undermine the federal objectives embodied in statutes enacted by Congress. The employment provisions of the IIRAO [Illegal Immigration Relief Act Ordinance] “stand[] as an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution” of IRCA’s objectives, Hines, 312 U.S. at 67, and thus are pre-empted.

The appeals court decision upheld a U.S. District judge’s 2007 ruling which dismissed the ordinance, stating that “immigration law is the province of the federal government alone.” “This is a major defeat for the misguided, divisive and expensive anti-immigrant strategy that Hazleton has tried to export to the rest of the country,” said Omar Jadwat of the ACLU. “The Constitution does not allow states and cities to interfere with federal immigration laws or to adopt measures that discriminate against Latino and immigrant communities.”

However, a lot of the damage is already done. As many as 5,000 Latinos abandoned Hazleton as shopkeepers reported that their business dropped by 20%. In 2009, Hazleton was forced to ask a federal judge to reconsider a ruling made in favor of the city’s insurance carrier that would hold the city responsible for paying $2.4 million in attorney fees incurred from the lawsuit.

It’s not a coincidence that SB-1070 architects Kris Kobach and Michael M. Hethmon of the Immigration Reform Law Institute not only helped draft Hazleton’s anti-immigrant ordinance, but also defended it in court. Kobach has also been busy unsuccessfully defending a similar ordinance in Farmers Branch, TX. So far the small Texas town has spent $3.2 million to repeal a federal district judge decision which deemed the town’s rental ban ordinance unconstitutional and may have to spend an additional $623,000 this year. He was also recently hired to defend an almost identical ordinance that he helped draft for the town of Fremont, NE.

A federal judge recently enjoined several of the most significant provisions of SB-1070, similarly arguing that that “the United States is likely to succeed on the merits in showing that…[they] are preempted by federal law.”

The New Republic’s bigot in chief Marty Peretz has been on quite a tear this week. On Tuesday, Peretz wondered whether “these people” — referring to Muslim Americans — “are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.”

On the upside, at least Peretz recognizes that Muslim Americans actually exist, which is more than he’s willing to say about the Palestinians, whose existence as a people he still maintains is an historical fiction, as he wrote yesterday:

The defeat of the Arabs of Palestine and the five warrior Arab states in 1948, 1967 and 1973 made a fictional people into a political force. We do not yet know whether this political force will mature into a real people. Or nation. My bet is “no.” I believe it will be more like a mini-Pakistan.

The historical fact of the Palestinians as a distinct national group has long been established by serious scholars, but it’s still resisted by hardline Zionists like Peretz, who find the idea of Palestinians living in Palestine inconvenient to their own preferred national mythology.

But Marty Peretz being a clownish anti-Arab bigot is a dog-bites-man story. I only bring it up to demonstrate, yet again, the double standard that exists in American media in regard to Jewish versus Palestinian national claims. Reporter Helen Thomas came under a hail of (appropriate) criticism and was eventually fired because of her offensive comment that the Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine.” Discussing that episode on CNN, journalist Jeffrey Goldberg suggested an equivalent claim in regard to the Palestinians:

KURTZ: You know, some critics out there say — I’m sure you’ve heard this — that this shows the U.S. press is pro-Israel and you get in trouble when you criticize Israel. And if Helen Thomas had said the opposite thing about the Palestinians, she’d still have her job.

GOLDBERG: I don’t think that last point is necessarily true. If you gave this long diatribe about the Palestinians don’t exist, which is sort of the equivalent argument, I don’t think you’re going to last that long in the mainstream press.

Now, obviously Thomas and Peretz are in different classes. Thomas earned her position through hard work. Peretz earned his through marrying into money and buying a magazine, and so can’t be fired. But his entire career as a writer has essentially been one “long diatribe about the Palestinians don’t exist,” and apart from a small handful of morally consistent writers like Matt Yglesias, Eric Alterman, and Glenn Greenwald, he’s never really been called to account for it, nor had to pay any price.

Condemning Thomas’ remarks, Goldberg wrote that they were “rooted in the same grotesque motivation” as Holocaust denial: “To deny to Jews the truth of their own history.” This is, of course, precisely what Peretz means to do to the Palestinians. I won’t hold my breath waiting for Goldberg to follow through on his own analogy and condemn Peretz’s comments, though. Like too many other liberal writers in DC, he doesn’t want to alienate a guy whose checks he hopes to continue cashing.