Why Islamic attacks in Europe and not the U.S?

A new McClatchy news report points out that there have been numerous terrorists attacks in Great Britain, and very few in the United States. You have to ask why. Turns out that the answer isn't that hard to find.

Karl-Heinz Kamp, the security policy coordinator at Germany's prestigious Konrad Adenauer research center, said it was easy to understand why.

"The U.S. has a historical advantage; America is still the land of opportunity to the whole world. The people moving there believe the American dream of social mobility," he said. "In Europe, we've historically treated our immigrants as hired help, and waited for them to finish the work they arrived for and go home."

Bob Ayers, a security and terrorism expert with London's Chatham House, a foreign-policy research center, thinks that immigrants to the U.S. actually become Americans, giving the United States a huge advantage in avoiding homegrown al Qaida terrorists. Europeans encourage immigrants to retain their native cultures, causing them to be ostracized more readily.

"The Islamic population in the United States is better assimilated into the general population, whereas here, in Germany, in France, they're very much on the outside looking in," he said. "When people get disaffected, sadly, there's not much loyalty to country in that sort of situation."

In short, the policy built into the U.S. Constitution that any child born in the U.S. is a full U.S. citizen prevents pockets of disaffection from developing in the U.S.

Anyone familiar with the German policy of allowing Turkish Guest Workers into Germany to work, then expecting them to leave and take their families with them doesn't work. That was obvious in the 1960's and has not changed.

That's not the only reason for so few attacks in the U.S. but it is a lot of it, and it sure makes the "guest worker" ideas in the proposed "Immigration Reform" legislation real non-starters.