So America want to tighten their border controls (or more specifically, their border with Mexico,) to prevent a continuing influx of illegal immigrants. Not surprisingly, a lot of people are unhappy about this. Even less surprisingly, a large number of them are Mexican. Read more on today's demonstrations on the BBC website.

What are we to make of this? Are the new border controls a perfectly reasonable measure, to protect America against a large number of people who, let's face it, are trying to take advantage of them? Or is this yet another symptom of America's insularity and suspicion of anything remotely foreign? (I still can't believe that the overwhelming majority of Americans don't even own a passport.) Probably a combination of the two.