As rioting spread to more than 300 French towns yesterday, Buba Camera, a Parisian native with Senegalese parents, said he was not surprised.

The recent immigrant to New York said the violence may be new, but the underlying problem is not. He said he has long witnessed the alienation of immigrant youth, most of whose parents, like his own, arrived from former French colonies in Africa.

The biggest problem – and difference from New York – is, “You have a French passport but they don’t treat you like a citizen,” Mr. Camera said.

Immigrants to America have at times rioted, but never on the scale Europe is seeing today. The Associated Press yesterday reported that President Chirac has blamed the problem on “the incapacity of French society to fully accept” French-born children of Arab and black African immigrants.

Some think New York could be vulnerable to the type of situation Europe is seeing. “If you think about what happened to Amadou Diallo, Ousmane Zongo: These are not isolated cases,” the president of the Association of Senegalese in America, Fallou Gueye, said. “As immigrants, we are isolated, marginalized, minorities. That frustration is there.”

Other West African immigrants and analysts instead stressed the different integration rates and economic realities.

“In the U.S., kids tend, for the most part, to become assimilated the way immigrants always have, and they feel part of the society. In France, that’s not happening,” the director of the Immigration and National Security Program at the Nixon Center in Washington, Robert Leiken, said. He noted, moreover, that this is not just a French problem, but one that is manifested throughout many European nations.

In the French suburbs where the rioting first erupted 12 days ago, essentially ghettos inhabited by primarily Muslim immigrants, satellite dishes dot the buildings and televisions are mainly tuned to Al Jazeera. Because they lack a place in French society, children of immigrants are watching and opting for a global Muslim identity, Mr. Leiken said.

Still, economic issues, not religious sentiments, are primarily driving the riots, he said. “I think the biggest difference is that in France there are many more welfare benefits for these people, but in New York there are jobs,” he said. “To some extent, what happens in France is almost an emasculation of these people.”

A job is what brought Mr. Camera to New York. In Paris, where according to the Associated Press the unemployment rate in some suburban neighborhoods runs as high as 40%, he said there is little work for young men like him.

The 25-year-old is part of an emerging flow from African countries to New York. As of 2000, 3.2% of the city’s foreign-born population hailed from African countries, according to city statistics. While the total, just less than 100,000, is relatively small, there are various seed populations from the continent with new communities beginning to put down roots in New York.

The three largest French-speaking African groups are Moroccans, Senegalese, and Algerians. As a composite, their mean income, $39,396 for the three groups combined, is well below the New York City average of $46,000, but still more than $2,000 more than the average immigrant income.

The draw to New York versus Paris goes beyond the financial, said Mr. Camera, who works at a shop on Fulton Avenue in Bedford Stuyvesant, selling everything from dried goat meat to a half-dozen varieties of cassava flour.

For one, police officers treat him with respect. “In France, if I see one black policeman it’s bizarre. Here, they are black, Hispanic, Chinese,” he said. “In France, you don’t speak to the police. In America, it’s cool.”

An immigrant from the Ivory Coast, Fatimata Lonfo, said this type of acceptance is an important difference from France, where as an immigrant one’s legal status is constantly checked. “Here, even if you don’t have your papers, they don’t bother you as long as you don’t do anything wrong.” Ms. Lonfo, the owner of Windyla’s Boutique at Staten Island, said. “In France, even if you go to the restaurant to buy bread you have to bring your I.D. with you.”