On Sun, 2 Jun 2002, Dennis Robert Redmond wrote:
> This was only partly true in 1992, but just not so in 2002. The EU has
> become an immigrant culture -- 10% of the German population, for example,
> are foreigners, and many draw welfare benefits.
That's a bit misleading. Many of those "foreigners" were born in Germany. Sometimes even their parents were born in Germany. In America, we'd call them Americans. The fact that they continue to be counted as foreigners is a sign of ethnocentrism, not multiculturalism, on the immigration question.
But to be fair, in welfare state terms, being a poor non-citizen in Germany is almost certainly better than being a poor citizen in the US. And there was an epochal change in the citizenship law a few years ago that will bear fruit in about 19 years.
Michael