Mr. Herrarte, a retired colonel, said the Bush administration had been treating Salvadoran migrants well despite strong anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States.

Traditionally, France treats migrants as individuals, to be offered assimilation and protected from persecution.

After a trial that attracted sustained attention in June, the central government abolished a law that gave the police power to treat rural migrants as vagrants who could be detained at will.

An ethnic Karen, Dr. Maung left Burma (Myanmar) after the 8888 Uprising and has since run a clinic treating Burmese refugees, migrants and orphans at Mae Tao Clinic in Mae Sot on the Thai-Burmese border, together with 100 paramedics and teachers.

Not only does the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees define what it means to be a refugee; it also clearly lays out the world's obligation to treat migrants humanely, to take their claims seriously and to offer sanctuary and protection to legitimate victims of oppression.

John Svan and the others were made naturalized US citizens and from that day on, it was forbidden to treat Finnish migrants and Americans of Finnish descent as not white.

If instead of treating city-bound migrants with contempt and leaving them to find their own way, they were first acclimatized, they would adapt far more successfully.

The European Union needs to learn from that and take the measure of this general and growing demand for a fairer, more dignified partnership, including in its way of treating migrants.

Not even the European Union has a monopoly on rights, as demonstrated by the insufferable way in which we treat migrants and Roma.