> Really? I had the impression that it was the US gov't controlled by rentier
> thugs that sets immigration policy. And I'd suggest that it's entirely
> clear if translations of Vietnamese poets into English counts as
> reconstruction.
The 1 million plus Vietnamese immigrants in the US and Canada regularly send hundreds of millions of dollars to their families, which is a sort of unofficial form of reparations. The US workingclass has a fine tradition of regarding the US government as something between ringworm and foot fungus, and for all the racism and xenophobia in US society, there's remarkable tolerance and multicultural solidarity, too -- something the EU, for all its good points, still has a long way to go to match.
The translations are important, because all sorts of academic links and funding gets kicked back to Vietnam, and the multicultural university, for all its limitations, is the crucial spawning-grounds for the multinational Left.
-- Dennis