Foreign Perspectives

Legal immigrants to America fall broadly into one of four categories:

1. Employment-based preference, essentially those who have skills that are in demand;
2. Family preference, which allows people to sponsor close relatives;
3. Diversity, which aims to increase the numbers of under-represented groups; and
4. Refugees

There aren’t any Canadian wetbacks for the simple reason that it’s relatively easy for a Canadian to live and work in America quite legally therefore the number of Canadian illegal immigrants to America is much smaller than it would be otherwise. Aside from that, the Canadian economy is on a par with that in America so there are very few economic migrants whereas this is by far the largest category of immigrants from Mexico.

However, those reasons don’t apply in Europe. With the fall of the Eastern Bloc we have neither the fences nor the border guards so it’s clearly much easier for people to just walk over the borders than it has been in the past. Yet, still we appear to have neither the number of illegals nor the complex about them that exists in America. How come?

It seems to me that it’s largely down to the difference between the economic geography of America compared to Europe.

America borders with two countries. Canada is relatively rich and there seem to be no worries about illegal immigration from Canada. Mexico is relatively poor and the Americans are talking about building a wall to keep out the flood of illegal immigrants.

Europe on the other hand has a group of relatively rich countries in the centre, slightly poorer ones surrounding it and poorer still a little further out. Therefore, by and large, there isn’t the massive jump in relative economic prosperity when you move from one country to its immediate neighbours as there exists between Mexico and America. Move from Romania to Bulgaria and there is little difference. Move from Romania to France and there’s a big difference but then there are several countries between Romania and France whereas Romania and Bulgaria share a border.

Of course there are illegal immigrants in Europe but their numbers are a good deal smaller than they would be were there the sharp difference in prosperity in neighbouring countries as exists between Mexico and America.

The banking scene in France is completely different from that in the UK. Whereas there are the “big four” in the UK, France doesn’t really have any truly big banks and the majority of French “banks” are what would be considered relatively small regional building societies in the UK. As with small building societies, the range of products is quite limited.

Next week we’ll begin with what you might think is the simplest part of this topic: UK banking & finance.

As soon as the temperature drops below around 30c over here, all the locals don their Winter coats. Not just any old Winter coat either for the coats on sale in the local shops seem more suited to Arctic conditions than the, usually, very mild Winters that we get here. Although it’s been warm enough for us to be running around in t-shirts almost all the time since March 2006 (yes, all year), the local population has been wearing their heavy coats since late September.

Perhaps the most noticeable difference that we’ve seen though is when our son was born here at the end of August. As you can imagine, it was pretty hot then (high 30s) and the maternity ward was even warmer than that. Now, I know that the rule is to wrap up babies after they’re born but with those kind of temperatures, we just put a nappy on him and nothing else. Yet, every time the nurses came into the room they insisted in wrapping him in three layers of clothing. Net effect? Well, if we’d stayed any longer he’d have been dehydrated as the sweat was just pouring out of him with all that clothing and he clearly wasn’t comfortable.

He’s still considerably behind in his vaccinations too because anytime that we’ve taken him along between roughly March and October they announce that he’s got a fever and can’t get the vaccination. Even outside that time, it’s often warm enough for him to “have a fever” so we’re lucky if we manage one vaccination per year.

So, whilst the icecream vans appear in Northern Ireland in March at perhaps 15c, you’d be unlikely to find anything similar below 25c over here.