But the sorts who are emigrating in order to carry out terrorist schemes and such are vastly outnumbered by people who emigrate in order to actively join and assimilate to another culture and its ideals, right? I would say this is true in the U.S.
There are plenty of immigrants, at least in Britain, who don't integrate particularly well but don't go so so far as to blow themselves up over it!
Language is a big problem of course, and it's very telling (and very
bad) that the Government has (as I understand it) decided to scrap free English lessons for all immigrants except those on benefits just because the Tory press gets indignant whenever it thinks immigrants, or anyone else for that matter*, is 'getting something for nothing'. The upshot of this, in purely economic terms, is that translation services will have to provided for immigrants who would otherwise have made at least some effort to learn English - because most of them, by definition, don't have much money and are unlikely to pay for lessons out of their pockets - and that immigrants who don't learn the language will end up in much less well-paid jobs than they could get otherwise, therefore paying less tax and buying less stuff. So even thinking just in cold hard cash, it's a complete loser of an idea; that's without taking into account the human effect of immigrants finding it harder to integrate, and more and more native Brits being made to feel like foreigners in their own country - all grist to the Sun/Mail/Express's wheel, of course...
*edit: the royal family exluded, heh heh
