Paris, July 2, 2009 – Since President Barack Obama in his recent Cairo speech made a tut-tutting remark about countries that restricted wearing religious garb in school, the controversy over the Muslim burqa has resumed in Europe.

It’s not a problem in the United States. Not many women are on the streets of New York or Chicago wearing totally enveloping gowns with only a mesh to look through. Few immigrants to the United States are from the countries where this is worn. Arab immigrants from the Middle East are more often than not middle-class, many are Christian, and nearly all are in America by choice and ambition, eager to celebrate the Fourth of July.

The American immigration model bears little resemblance to those in Europe, being – for naturalized citizens – non-directive, non-supportive and very open and free for those who accept a powerful popular conformism and intense American nationalism.

Americans, Canadians and the British usually expect everyone to wear whatever they want. Even Royal Canadian Mounted Policemen wear turbans, if they are Sikhs -- not yet the practice among New York City mounted policemen, nor the city’s bicycle-mounted delivery-men. But perhaps these are not jobs Sikhs want.

In Europe, clothing and immigration are closely connected. There was controversy in Britain last year when young black or Asian men wearing “hoodies” – hooded sweatshirts – received an inordinate amount of attention from the police. An objectively unanswerable question of political correctness was thereby posed, concerning police discrimination (or “racial profiling”).

If noisy young men traveling in groups and wearing hoodies are – or are perceived as -- responsible for a disproportionate amount of small-time crime and nuisance in a given neighborhood, or at certain train or subway stations, or even if similarly garbed French youth are suspected of burning their neighbors’ cars on festive occasions, is it racial profiling for the police to stop and question them, or search them for illegal weapons?