Good point, I suppose there's ways to go about it that are less obvious and without really requiring especially overt political/legal backing to support it.

I was mostly going off of the issue where France is trying to respond with surveillance state measures, which is only going to hurt everyone in the long run, not just the angry immigrants the government is presumably trying to respond to.

Though I guess we could always go further down the rabbit hole by considering the possibility that the riots were deliberately instigated by government agents as an excuse to expand government powers.

Not sure I'd buy into that one though, something about it doesn't fit quite right in this instance.