ABSTRACT
Exacerbating the school violence problem is the increasing heterogeneity of all modern societies, as migration, legal and illegal, undermines the cultural homogeneity that once provided social glue. In many of the large cities of Great Britain, France, Germany, and Spain, foreign-born workers and their children live in subcultural enclaves. With parents from Pakistan, Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, Cyprus, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and the West Indies, children may not hear fluent English, French, German, or Spanish in their homes. The United States also faces the difficulty of absorbing large numbers of people from diverse cultures. More than half a million legal immigrants come to the United States each year, as well as several hundred thousand illegal immigrants. French newspaper accounts say that older adolescents extort money and valuables from younger ones by threats of violence. Dropout-prevention programs mobilize both carrots and sticks in an effort to get every child to graduate from high school.
