My boyfriend, who is German, made a complaint about the number of Turkish immigrants in Berlin. I was a tad contrarian considering that he, himself, is a German immigrant. I also offered up the argument that my parents were perfectly well-adjusted immigrants.

Boyfriend: But that's different. Canada is a country structured around the need for immigration.

Me: Yes, but there is still a national identity of which to speak, though I understand it doesn't have the same history as Germany. - (facetiously) What if I was Turkish! Would you not love me?

Boyfriend: But you're not Turkish.

Me: Well, that's beside the point.

Boyfriend: The point is that there is a German culture to lose, but no such thing in Canada.

Whilst I believe in a diverse, but culturally unified, society, I understood his point. Concentrated mass immigration is no good for anyone, and in lieu of creating a multi-cultural society, creates one that stands to be divided. The Can-American example is altogether unique because the culture which it references is one that is by definition hyper-inclusive. German culture, or exchangably any other country with a strong national spirit, really does sacrifice its culture at the expense of being dominated by another with a strong national spirit.

Basically, one of the arguments for immigration involves a multi-cultural society, but the phenomenon that threatens to occur is mono- or bi-culturalism. One strong culture naturally threatens to trump the other when a large influx of 'x' group occurs, especially in a concentrated area, like Berlin. The threat to German culture is ignored in the lost call for diversity.

Reciprocal acceptance needs to exist in order for cultural co-existence to persist. An immigrant should fundamentally be open to, or adopt, the values of one's new country, whilst importing the best from their own culture.

Martin earlier spelled out an argument for why we should let lazy and stupid people in Western societies vote: They constitute the group most affected by work force immigration from non-Western countries. On second thought, however, this argument may not hold water, given that not only low-class workers are affected by competition from immigrants. The CEO of an Indian outsourcing tech company explains:

The official wanted to know why HCL, a $2.5 billion (revenue) company with more than 3,000 people across 21 offices in 15 states, wasn't hiring more people in his state. Vineet's short answer: because most American college grads are "unemployable."

Many American grads looking to enter the tech field are preoccupied with getting rich, Vineet said. They're far less inclined than students from developing countries like India, China, Brazil, South Africa, and Ireland to spend their time learning the "boring" details of tech process, methodology, and tools--ITIL, Six Sigma, and the like.

As a result, Vineet said, most Americans are just too expensive to train--despite the Indian IT industry's reputation for having the most exhaustive boot camps in the world. To some extent, he said, students from other highly developed countries fall into the same rut.

Turns out American college graduates may find themselves in tough competition with immigrant workers, because they've been educated in high Western style not to take shit from anyone and only to aim for dreams that come with six figures. Their immigrant counterparts, in turn, come from developing economies and would gladly perform tons of boring overwork for less pay, simply to sustain their families.

Martin, does this mean we should let smart and lazy people vote, too?

London, UK - A huge swell of support for the far-right amongst ethnic minorities is developing, a YouGov poll has shown.

Directed at the immigration population of Great Britain, one section of the survey asked what their voting intentions would be if an election were to be called in 2009.

Astoundingly, the results showed that almost 50% of the respondents are intending on voting for "any party of the far-right".

Trevor Philips, Chairman of the UK's Human Rights and Equality Commission, said: "Some political parties are offering bursaries of thousands of pounds for free air-travel away from this place. For families that were duped into coming here, that is an offer hard to resist."

One migrant worker explained his own reasons today: "I came here for work after the government asked me. What they didn't tell me is that the UK is full of ugly morons and the weather is terrible."

"Being paid to leave this toilet? How can I refuse that?"

Frank mentions in passing that rich countries which allow immigrants from poorer countries "falsely believing they're doing the world a favor". I'm not sure if that belief really is false. I know plenty of people who went West either temporarily or permanently in search of better-paying work. Letting them in was definitely a favor to them as well as to their parents and other relatives back home whom they sent money. That's why immigration has been described as "the greatest anti-poverty campaign the world has ever known" - though I'm not entirely sure I buy that, the end of central economic planning in Eastern Europe seems to have been even more effective.

Immigration may be vastly more effective at making people less poor than other forms of government welfare, but effective doesn't mean free. Someone paying the cost to make immigrants lives' better, so who is it? Ignoring for the moment clear charity cases, such as refugees from war, famine, natural disasters and plague, as well as lazy immigrants who plan to live off welfare (who are another matter altogether), I will focus on who pays to enrich those who migrate seeking better work. It's mainly the people with whom they compete for jobs who find themselves with more competition and therefore find their opportunities and wages shrinking.

These people are, of course, at the low end of the labor market. If you've got real skills and aren't threatened by unemployment, there's not much motivation to seek your fortunes so far away, so the bulk of immigration (barring refugees from war, famine, plague etc.) will be low-skill or at least seeking mainly low-skill work in their new homeland. So the people paying for immigration are, mainly, the lazy and stupid, as well as teenagers just entering the workforce and university students doing part-time work.

Sure, the West's lazy and stupid are richer than the immigrants they (unwillingly) help, but does that mean they should be paying the cost? That's not an easy moral question, even though I expect there's not a lot of sympathy for the lazy and stupid among our readers. Sympathy aside, though this very much is their business. I therefore propose that laws setting any country's immigration policies should be set by referendum in which anyone with above-average intelligence, higher education or a decent-paying job not be allowed to vote. These decisions, like all political decisions, are currently up to our elites who may be a lot of things, but they are both more intelligent and harder-working than the average person. That makes them completely unqualified to decide in this case. I'm not generally in favor of democracy and voting, but in cases where we only want stupid and lazy people to have a say it should work just fine.