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

Eventually my Paris cabbie figured out where we were going and took us there: The National Centre for the History of Immigration.

It was actually easy to find (imposing Art Deco building, 20 minutes from the Louvre). 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 of immigrants into French society and advance the views and attitudes on immigration in France." It opened quietly in 2007.

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President Nicolas Sarkozy refused to attend its inauguration — he feared demonstrations against his own immigration policies — and so it opened without fanfare or official ceremony.  

Understanding the immigrant experience in France seems important at this moment.  

Why, for instance, did 18-year-old Mehdi Crepin, who was born here to a French 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 on French people," he told us. "For me it's not true. That is what the world has to hear today."

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 of the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition. The exposition was meant to show what the French were up to in North Africa, that their interest in Africa was more like a cultural exchange than exploitative assimilation. The exposition was public relations.

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

The building shares space with a public aquarium, but neither it nor the museum seems a particularly hot ticket for 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 nation in the world in the 1930s.

A history of French xenophobia

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

There is poignant art representing the loneliness of exclusion and isolation from 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, for instance, 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 have immigrants settle here.  

Marie Curie, who was born in Poland and became a French citizen, gets some attention. So does the German-born French composer Jacques Offenbach.

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

She quotes the writer Ian McEwan to explain why it matters that a museum help us to understand the experiences of other people: "Imagining what it's like to be someone other than yourself is the core of our humanity. 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 immigration museum called 19 Princelet Street in London.  

There you'll find overt attempts to put you into the shoes of someone who, for instance, must decide which three possessions — and only three — to take as he or she 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 is text 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 for work, bringing disease, potentially delinquent, politically threatening, irreducibly different." 

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

Really?

That optimism seems misplaced at the moment. The anti-immigrant National Front party led by Marine Le Pen is on the rise in France.

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

A video by the anti-immigrant group Open Gates that talks of the forced collective suicide of European nations went viral in Europe a week ago before YouTube took it down.

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 the beginning of morality," then it is at best a well-intentioned failure and at worst, not even well-intentioned, just a failure.