The US is not much different as most brown skin people seeking legal status can attest. I was lucky to benefit from the cold war game, and the INS agent who processed my green card application was brutally honest about it, saying "We need white professional people like you." I had no illusion about that, but no remorse either. If somebody gives strangers $1,000 gifts to show off to his buddies how generous he is or to put down those who cannot afford such a gift - most people take the money but it does not buy any respect for the donor.
> india is overpopulated. bangladesh is overpopulated (i think). sweden is
> not!
It is a bit more complicated, see the following population density stats:
http://www.photius.com/wfb1999/rankings/population_density_2.html
For example, Belgium and the Netherlands are more overpopulated than India, but not as much as Bangladesh. Germany is more overpopulated than China. Sweden and Canada are among the least populated countries in the world, but that would change dramatically if you exclude from the equation the inhabitable areas that comprise large shares of these countries' territories. Ditto about Russia.
The US has one of the lowest population density in the world, but unlike Sweden, Canada or Russia - most of its territory is habitable. In fact, the Netherlands is over 15 times more densely populated than the US, the UK and Germany - eight times, Denmark and France - 4 times. Yet, these countries collectively take more immigrants than the US!
Of course, the issue of immigration is far more complex than the physical capacity to accept newcomers. Few people would argue that immigrants can vastly enrich the recipient's country culture - but it can also threaten its most basic institutions. It is one thing when immigrants open, say, a Mediterranean restaurant or publish books grounded in Mediterranean literary tradition - but it is a very different thing when immigrants demand that "their" women be exempt from western laws and subjected to Islamic law instead or when they start assassinating writers whose writings they find objectionable.
Immigrant Islamo-fascism is a real threat in Europe (unlike in the US, which is threatened by the home-grown variety of Christo-fascism that controls most public institutions) and most reasonable and open-minded people expect their governments to do protect them from that threat. Their attempts to limit immigration are quite understandable, even though they may appear unfair to bona fide immigrants.
And then - why does any country, rich or poor, have any moral or legal obligation to accept immigrants? I can understand that a specific case can be made, e.g. based on the concepts of nationality and diaspora (cf. the Israel's right of return) or contested national allegiance (cf. Kashmir and Pakistan) - but I do not see any universal principle that would require a country to accept immigrants. The one that comes close is that of charity - but this is such a compromised and abused principle that it shares company with religion and patriotism in the category of refuges for scoundrels.
> also, surely you see that european colonialism of the third world
> was a form of terrorism too!
I do not think European colonialism was any different form any other conquest of one culture by another - which make the history of humankind. A case can be even made that European colonialism had a net benefit effect by undoing the negative effect of prior colonisations. The case of Tanganyika and Zanzibar is a case in point - these East African countries were colonized ca, 15th century by Arabs and became a major source of slave trade which ended in the 19th century with European colonization.
The bottom line is that blaming the North for all the ills of the South might be popular, but it usually serves as a scapegoat story to exonerate local elites and has little factual basis or explanatory power.
Wojtek