March 17, 2004
Pew poll
The poll by the Pew Global Attitudes Project in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East, measuring attitudes toward the Bush administration, fear of (or enthusiasm for) terrorism, attitudes toward the Iraq war and so forth, got eight or ten inches in today's Globe, but the full text is worth a look.
They ignored Canada, but an AP poll released a week or so ago didn't.
One frustrating tidbit -
" ... one of the largest gaps between Americans and Europeans concerns the question of whether people who move to the U.S. have a better life. Americans overwhelmingly believe this to be the case – 88% say people who move to the U.S. from other countries have a better life. By contrast, just 14% of Germans, 24% of French and 41% of British think that people who have moved to the U.S. from their countries have a better life."
This seems to me to be a waste of a question. There wasn't large-scale immigration to the U.S. from France or Britain in the 20th century - the several large waves of British emigrants ended up for the most part in the Dominions. German emigration to the U.S. wound down by 1914. So it isn't clear whose experiences the poll respondents had in mind when they answered the question.
It would have been much more useful to ask Western Europeans whether they thought immigrants to their own countries, who are numerous and very visible in each case, were better off.