Immigration museum in Paris is harsh and honest but incomplete: Keith Boag

Eventually my Pariscabbiefigured out where we were going and took us there:TheNational Centre for the History of Immigration.

It was actually easy to find (imposing Art Deco building, 20 minutes from theLouvre). He'd simply never heard of it.

I suspect that is true for most Parisians.

The museum's mission is to "contribute to the recognition of the integration ofimmigrants into French society and advance the views and attitudes on immigrationin France."It opened quietly in 2007.

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President Nicolas Sarkozy refused to attend its inauguration he feareddemonstrations against his own immigration policies and so it opened withoutfanfare or official ceremony.

Understanding the immigrant experience in France seems important at thismoment.

Why, for instance, did 18-year-old Mehdi Crepin, who was born here to aFrench father and Algerian mother, speak to us as an Arab after Friday's massacre?

"They always say that Arabs are bad persons, they always have bad influence onFrench people," hetold us. "For me it's not true. That is what the world has to heartoday."

Why are some Muslims fearful of what might happen next?

The museum was revealing, but mostly in unintended ways.

The government chose to place it on the site ofthe 1931 ParisColonial Exposition.The exposition was meant to show what the French were up to in North Africa, thattheir interest in Africa was more like a cultural exchange thanexploitativeassimilation. The expositionwas public relations.

The exterior walls of the museum are a busy collection of bas-reliefs depictingnearly naked native people at work in fields and hammering things:stereotypicallycolonial representations that have nothing to do with, and were never intended tocapture, the immigrant experience.

The building shares space with a public aquarium, but neither it nor themuseum seems a particularly hot ticketfor locals or tourists.Inside the exhibitions are few, sparse and mostly dull.

We learn that France had the highest number of immigrants per capita of any nationin the world in the 1930s.

A history of French xenophobia

Displays of books, magazines, pamphlets and buttons catalogue a history of Frenchxenophobia.

There is poignant art representing the loneliness of exclusion and isolationfrom mainstream society.

It's a pretty harsh and honest account, but still incomplete.

If there was anything said of the massacre of Algerians by Paris police in 1961, forinstance, it wasn't presented to draw my attention, and I missed it.

Nor was there much emphasis on why France should actually be proud to haveimmigrants settle here.

Marie Curie, who was born in Poland and became a French citizen, gets someattention. So does the German-born French composerJacques Offenbach.

But the overall impression from the museum is one of "objectification, stereotypingand silencing," in the words ofSophia Labadi, a scholar of cultural heritage.

She quotes the writerIan McEwanto explain why it matters that a museum help usto understand the experiences of other people:"Imagining what it's like to be someone other than yourself is the core of ourhumanity. It is the essence of compassion and the beginning of morality."

There are ways to do it all this better, writes Labadi. She points to the immigrationmuseum called19 Princelet Street in London.

There you'll find overt attempts to put you into the shoes of someone who, forinstance, must decide which three possessions and only three to take as he orshe leaves home for a new beginning in a different country.

There are interactive experiments to uncover the submerged racism hidden inside us.

It's a teaching museum in modern ways that its French counterpart is not.

On one wall of the National Centre for the History of Immigration in Paris there istext titled "Welcoming Land, Hostile France."

It reads in part, "In every era, public opinion reinvents the image of the non-integrating foreigner."

The familiar prejudices

It describes the familiar prejudices: "Too many foreigners, too many competitors forwork, bringing disease, potentially delinquent, politically threatening, irreduciblydifferent."

But then it finishes: "Nowadays more and more people are opening up to diversity."

Really?

That optimism seems misplaced at the moment. The anti-immigrantNational Frontparty led by Marine Le Pen is on the rise in France.

Here and elsewhere in the Western world political leaders are trying to outbid eachother on tough-minded and hard-hearted promises to push back against refugees.

A video by the anti-immigrant group Open Gatesthat talks of the forced collectivesuicide of European nations went viral in Europe a week ago before YouTube took itdown.

And all that was before the attacks in Paris on Friday.

So if France's National Centre for the History of Immigration is to help us imagine"what it's like to be someone else" and discover "the essence of compassion and thebeginning of morality," then it is at best a well-intentioned failure and at worst, noteven well-intentioned, just a failure.