>If the USA were really "the greatest country in the world," we'd have
>the shortest hours of work and the highest living standard. However,
>we have yet to win the Gold Medal in the Working-Day Olympics, the
>Health Care Olympics, the Education Olympics, and so on and so forth.
Well, the nice WHITE (or at least they want to stay that way as much as possible) social democracies of Europe are trying to hold onto those statistics by pulling up the drawbridges to keep the brown hordes out-- see today's announcement from Britain and the shift of governments to the Right across Europe. While in the United States, after the failed lurch towards anti-immigrant hysteria of Prop 187, a solid consensus towards welcoming roughly 1 million new immigrants a year (legal and illegal) has basically been reestablished.
Look around the industrialized world and the United States is probably the only country improving conditions for immigrants, from restoring benefits for legal immigrants to passing amnest provisions in the House.
And this is not unrelated; just as South African Apartheid could maintain a nice welfare state for its white minority, the white working class of Europe could more easily maintain a nice welfare state as long as they kept immigration down. The calculations were a bit tougher in the United States with its much greater open door to immigration, and notably an immigration policy that welcomes far more poorer, less skilled immigrants than countries like Canada, that are rather ruthless in only cream-skimming the educated elites from developing countries.
I will generally say without qualification that, overall, the United States immigration policy, despite its problems, is the greatest on earth, the most welcoming to the poor, the most multi-racial in its breadth, and the quickest to convert new immigrants into full citizens.
-- Nathan Newman