From Tom Firedman's column today:

In part it is the awful barriers that now surround the U.S. Embassy in London on Grosvenor Square. "They have these cages all around the embassy now, and these huge concrete blocks, and the whole message is: 'Go away!' " said Kate Jones, a British literary agent who often walks by there. "That is how people think of America now, and it's a really sad thing because that is not your country."

She has it precisely wrong—these are barriers put up not because it is "our country"; these barriers are put up because of what YOUR country has become—a hot bed where asylum seekers can take advantage of ridiculously easy immigration laws to sneak into your nation ,go on the dole, and find a congenial environment (supported and promoted by many in your academic, media and political worlds) to promote incitement and hatred against America. These safety procedures are saying something about your country—not ours.

Does Friedman read the papers? Holland and Germany are both substantially toughening up their requirements regarding immigrants, Spain is facing pressure from the rest of the EU for its increasingly open borders policy regarding North African immigrants, one of the most significant reasons that the French and the Dutch have and will reject the EU Constitution is because of xenophobic fears regarding competition from East European laborers (the Polish plumber issue) and Turk laborers. Europe is not the utopia for immigrants that he assumes it to be.

Ed Lasky    6 1 05