Senator Alexander of Tennessee argued yesterday that recent rioting by Muslim youths in France should be a wake-up call to American policymakers to deal squarely with immigration problems in this country.

“We should learn a lesson from our friends across the ocean,” the Republican senator said during a speech on the Senate floor. “We would be wise to consider their quandary.”

Mr. Alexander suggested that the violence that rocked Paris in October and November was prompted by inadequate planning for the challenges posed by large urban concentrations of under-employed immigrants and their families.

“The French are trying to figure out how to integrate this disaffected population, the children of Muslim immigrants, into French society,” Mr. Alexander said. He quoted French statistics that said 126 police officers were injured, 9,000 cars were torched, and $250 million in damages resulted from the unrest.

Mr. Alexander also noted than in the wake of the bombings in London’s public transit system, Britain has moved to reorient its immigration policies to promote assimilation. He said he favors securing America’s borders and awarding a “lawful status” to foreigners who are working in this country. “They need a legal status that respects our rule of law,” said the senator.

Earlier this month, The New York Sun reported that a Bush administration official, Steven Law, publicly invoked the specter of the Paris riots as an argument for Mr. Bush’s new immigration initiative. “If you want to see some of the consequences of getting it wrong, you only have to look at what has been happening in Europe, particularly in France,” the official told a meeting of Republican governors in California.

Mr. Law, who is deputy secretary of labor and formerly served as executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said the violence in Paris demonstrated the dangers of “not having a rational, as well as a compassionate, immigration policy.”

People deeply involved in the immigration debate said yesterday that there has been a steady subcurrent of discussion about the Paris riots. “It’s sort of being talked about sotto voce,” an advocate of tighter immigration controls, Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, said. “There’s just a certain reluctance to draw the connection for reasons of political correctness, I suppose. Also because Mexicans aren’t Arabs,” he said.

An immigration proponent, Tamar Jacoby of the Manhattan Institute, said immigration critics point to the unrest in France as grounds to limit immigration, while she believes the violence shows the need to give illegal immigrants legal status. “The lesson it teaches is not don’t have immigrants,” she said. “The lesson it teaches is figure out how to integrate them.”