If you want to read something sane about America’s immigration nonproblem for a change, try this from Pierre Tristam. Pierre is an immigrant himself, from Lebanon, and I’d happily exchange a couple of hundred thousand nativist flamers, slack jaws flecked with foam, for a few more like him. Pierre is a columnist for the Daytona Beach News-Journal and blogs at Candide’s Notebooks.
Why do Muslims in Spain and England feel compelled to blow up trains and buses, Muslims in France feel compelled to riot and Muslims in Holland to murder in the name of Allah, while Muslims in the United States seem content to grab their piece of suburbia and, at worst, vote Republican (as they overwhelmingly did in 2000, but, quick learners that they are, not in 2004)? The question lends itself to many answers, some of them emblematic of the difference between Europe and the United States in one regard: The United States has generally done an admirable job of accepting and integrating its immigrants. Europe hasn't…
I've pointed out that the biggest difference between the U.S. and, say, France, is that even illegal immigrants in the United States have hope for the future -- their children (or grandchildren), at least, will be U.S. citizens, having been born on U.S. soil and thus by the Constitution given citizenship. The same is not true of France. There you have 4th generation descendants of Algerians who fled with the French troops in the early 60's (because they sided with the French in the civil war that led to Algerian independence) who still aren't French citizens, and never will be because they lack that all-so-important French "blood" (which, apparently, is a different color from everybody else's blood). No hope = rioting. If you got nothing to lose, why *not* kill people and burn shit down?!
-- Badtux the Hopeful Penguin
It's worst in Germany. We still have all this Aryan blood-stuff splattered all over our law code. People who have lived somewhere in Russia or the former USSR for centuries are still considered German because they are of German ancestry. On the oher hand, children with parents of foreign nationality will remain foreigners even if they were born in Germany and spent their whole life here. So, for example, in the case of asylum seekers we can evict a 15-year-old to his "home country" which he has never seen and where he doesn't even know the language. And we do.