Guest Workers, Part 2

This is an excellent report on the "border activism" of The Minuteman Project, a group President Bush, to his credit, has referred to as "vigilantes". (If you have problems playing this WMA file, just right-click, save the link address and copy it into Winamp or Windows Media Player. There is a "Play URL" option in the File menu for both programs.)

The Guardian/Observer has an article on The Minuteman Project here.

In another parallel with the mass migration of unlettered Mexicans to the U.S., The Economist recently said:

EUROPEANS' perceptions of Turkey are often shaped by the Turks they know. In Germany, these tend to be the Gastarbeiter (guest workers) who moved there in the 1960s to take up low-grade jobs that the booming post-war economy could no longer fill from the domestic labour market. Over 2m Turks came, and they were mostly honest, hard-working and religious people. But they were economic refugees, poor villagers from the east, not model citizens of Ataturk's republic.

Many of their children, though, have moved on, to become anything from prominent European parliamentarians to star European footballers. One of them even married one of the sons of Helmut Kohl, a former German chancellor. It is just the sort of transformation that Ataturk would have wished for his countrymen.

Yet experience of the Gastarbeiter has left Germans in two minds about Turkish entry into the EU. Their main worry is about a massive further inflow of economic migrants. The Social Democrat-led government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is generally supportive, but the opposition Christian Democrats, led by Angela Merkel, have vowed to do everything possible to wreck Turkey's application. A federal election is due next year, with the outcome still wide open. Even Mr Kohl, the Christian Democrat chancellor who was voted out in 1998, has spoken against Turkish membership, saying that he is “convinced that Turkey will not fulfil the Copenhagen criteria”. These are the basic conditions for joining the EU, which lay down that “membership requires that the candidate country has achieved stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities.”