A rather sweeping opinion was recently expressed in the Netherlands regarding a failed government policy:

AMSTERDAM, 27/03/08 - The majority of the Dutch are negative on Islam and immigration. [...]

According to 56 percent of the Dutch, Islam is a threat to the Dutch identity. As well, 57 percent named admitting large groups of immigrants as “the biggest mistake in Dutch history”.
[Dutch: Mass Immigration Our Biggest Mistake Ever, NIS News, March 23, 2008]

I’m watching episodes of Poirot, the TV series, starring David Suchet as Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s famous Belgian detective. It’s set in England during the 1920s, and so far all the characters, victims, detectives, neighbors, and servants [!] are white, and except for Poirot himself, most are English. Almost everyone in English was white in the 1930s, with a few exceptions.

I wonder if this is part of the secret of the show’s popularity, based on nostalgia for a pre-multicultural Britain, and if there have been complaints about it. I believe Dame Agatha did occasionally include non-white characters, but of course they were not treated with modern political correctness, so they can’t be shown.Perhaps later episodes will be different.

By the way, it’s not an anomaly, as it is on Law and Order, that all the criminals were white, that was who did commit crimes in Britain in the 1930s. Of course there was much less crime.

A report by a committee of Britain’s House of Lords says what we’ve been saying for years--that immigration does not help the economy of the receiving country. It may help the immigrants, it may help employers of cheap labor, it may help the folks at home that immigrants send money to, but it doesn’t help the economy.

Immigration is not a benefit to the economy and should be cut, say peers - Times Online
April 1, 2008

By Richard Ford, Home Correspondent

Immigration should be capped, according to a parliamentary report published today which concludes that record numbers of new immigrants have had “little or no impact” on economic well being.

Some groups, including the low-paid, young people seeking jobs and some ethnic minorities, may have suffered because of competition for work from immigrants willing to accept low wages and poor working conditions.

Today’s report, from the Lords Economic Affairs Committee, whose members include two former Conservative Chancellors of the Exchequer, seeks to undermine the Government’s claim that record levels of immigration have boosted the economy.

It also sets out to demolish a range of arguments in favour of immigration, including the one that foreigners are needed to prevent labour shortages and also to help to support an increasingly ageing population.[More]

Patrick Patrick Thibodeau writes at Computerworld:

In the 2006-’07 academic year, only 8,021 students graduated with computer science degrees from these schools — the lowest number of graduates this decade.

By contrast, in 2003-’04 — the high point of this decade — 14,185 students were awarded bachelor’s degrees in computer science

Now, Bill Gates whines that the problem is not enough low-cost H-1b visas. Now, Japan, China, Taiwan and Singapore don’t have anything like these low cost visas. Singapore does make extensive use of guest worker visas-and companies using them pay substantially for that privilege.

I once heard that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result”. What we have seen is that coupling H-1b expansion with declining US tech employment has meant that US students look for work elsewhere.