Via Laban Tall's UK Commentators blog, this interview with Salman Rushdie in the Independent. A highlight:

I have spent a lot of my life looking positively at the consequences of migration. Now I'm being forced to see that there's a nightmare as well as a dream.

Rushdie is of course referring to the threat posed by radical Islam, now solidly implanted across Western Europe. But there's reason to think mass migration may simply be undesirable in its own right, Islam or no.

Not all dreams are nightmares, of course, but that doesn't necessarily mean the rest are sweet...

A lot of blogs picked up on this story last week (see here, here and here) but it is still worth noting for the record (more particularly, the I-told-you-so department therof).

Esteemed Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has said what quite a few people have long suspected but not dared say in public: that high degrees of ethnic and racial diversity destroy the conditions of social solidarity in affected communities.

The Financial Times reports:

A bleak picture of the corrosive effects of ethnic diversity has been revealed in research by Harvard University’s Robert Putnam, one of the world’s most influential political scientists.

His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone – from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.

[...] When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. “They don’t trust the local mayor, they don’t trust the local paper, they don’t trust other people and they don’t trust institutions,” said Prof Putnam. “The only thing there’s more of is protest marches and TV watching.”

The FT has a follow-up article here. It's worth noting that Putnam intentionally delayed publishing his findings before he could find a "solution" to the problems he identified. The solution, you ask?

“What we shouldn’t do is to say that they [immigrants] should be more like us. We should construct a new us.”

Thanks for the science, Bob.

So says out-going Mexican Foreign Minister, Luis Ernesto Derbez, in an interview with French center-right daily Le Figaro (translation here). It appears that Mexico is unhappy with Congress' decision, last Wednesday, to authorize construction of a 700 mile long fence along the southern frontier with Mexico.

Alas, it is universally acknowledged that our government has no such intention. So what to make of all the fuss south of the border? Le Figaro reports:

As a protest against the manipulation of this law, Mexican President-elect Felipe Calderon is reluctant to visit the United States before his inauguration. Calderon has already visited nine Latin American countries as well as scheduled a forthcoming trip to Canada.

Apparently, the very idea that elected American representatives might for once bow to public opinion on the question of immigration -- symbolically and in complete bad faith, I hasten to add -- is enough to generate a mini-crisis in Mexican-American diplomatic relations.

You shouldn't take it so hard, Felipe. George Bush has let us down, too.

From my latest VDare piece:

When Poland and seven other former Soviet bloc countries joined the European Union in 2004, Tony Blair’s government assured the British public that the country would not be flooded by job-seeking migrants from the East. At most, ministers asserted—at most—Britain could expect around 15,000 additional immigrants per year.

Not for the first time, a government’s math has proven wildly, grotesquely wrong...

Elsewhere in Europe, ministers struggle to come to grips with the growing wave of illegal immigrants attempting to enter the EU on its southern frontiers. Heather first blogged about it here. Since then, French Interior Minister and 2007 presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy has urged fellow EU leaders to agree to a ban on future amnesties. Le Figaro reports (my translation here):

At a speech today in Madrid before an inter-ministerial meeting of the European Union's eight Mediterranean member states, Nicolas Sarkozy will endorse a "ban" on massive regularizations. According to a text made public on the eve of the Madrid meeting, M. Sarkozy will prospose a "future ban on all massive regularizations" as part of the "European pact" on immigration that he supports.

Sarkozy is an astute politican who understands that positionning himself as an advocate of tighter borders makes the best electoral sense. But he is also right: Europe will never get control of its immigration mess as long as individual member states continue to use amnesties as a way of making up for temporary labor shortfalls.