The fierce debate on immigration ignores a crucial reality -- what is happening to the United States is only one piece, although a big one, of a much larger global picture.

That hit me a couple of weeks ago when I was in Singapore. The Southeast Asian island nation has long been hailed as an economic model, the business capital for the entire region.

But it is an economy facing demographic peril. Its small population of 4 million is shrinking, thanks to a very low fertility rate. Prosperous Singaporean couples work hard, have fewer children and worry about how to take care of their aging parents. By 2050, Singapore will have a median age of over 52, one of the oldest in the world.

Singapore's answer is to import labor. A third of its workforce are migrants, from construction workers to maids. One out of seven households employs a domestic worker -- low-paid women mostly from neighboring Philippines and Indonesia.

Singapore tries to lure "talents'' -- highly skilled and affluent migrants -- to stay permanently. But the men hauling bricks and the maids washing laundry are in a separate class of temporary guest workers, with no chance to join Singaporean society. If a maid becomes pregnant, she is shipped out within seven days. Employers have to post bonds that must be paid should their servants break the rules and try to stay, putting them in the role of migrant police.

Problems of abuse of domestic workers, including physical and sexual violence and confinement, are serious enough to have prompted a report last December by Human Rights Watch.

Singapore's dependence on migrant labor and its guest-worker policy may be at the extreme end but it's very much on the global spectrum. Labor, like capital and goods before it, is part of a global market. The movement of people across borders in search of wages and work, most of it from developing countries to developed, is growing at a phenomenal pace.

The numbers are staggering. From 1980 to 2000, the number of migrants living in the developed world more than doubled from 48 million to 110 million. Migrants make up an average 12 percent of the workforce in high-income countries. About 4 million migrants cross borders illegally every year.

The demand for labor is driven in part by a demographic disaster -- the falling birth rates of developed countries. Almost all of those countries now have fertility rates that are well below 2.1, the level at which a population replaces itself. At the very low end are Hong Kong (0.94), Korea (1.22) and Singapore in Asia (1.24), along with much of Eastern Europe.

Low fertility means shrinking workforces and aging populations. Without migration, according to a recent study, Europe's population would have declined by 4.4 million from 1995 to 2000. Immigration accounted for 75 percent of U.S. population growth during the same period.

This movement of people cannot be stopped, certainly not by hundreds of miles of fences or even by tens of thousands of border guards. It is an issue that cries out for global cooperation, for common policies that cut across national boundaries. Already, we can benefit from looking at what has worked -- and not worked -- elsewhere.

A Global Commission on International Migration, formed in 2003 by the United Nations secretary-general, has taken an initial stab. Their report, issued last winter, supports the growth of guest-worker programs.

The Senate immigration bill now up for debate includes a provision for a guest-worker program. The bill is clearly preferable to the punitive and ineffective approach of the House version. But the Singapore experience -- and previous guest-worker programs like the German import of Turks -- should prompt second thoughts about going down this road.

One problem is that the guests don't leave. The United States has its own experience with this in the bracero program to import farmworkers, and more recently with the supposedly temporary H1-B visas used so extensively by the high-tech industry here in Silicon Valley.

Most troubling to me, these programs create an underclass of migrants who are never assimilated, as happened in Germany. It sets us on the Singapore road, encouraging inhumane policing mechanisms. And it is a gilded invitation to employers to depress the wages and incomes of American workers, and not just in the dirty jobs that are supposedly so hard to fill.

The United States has been rightfully proud of a tradition that treats all immigrants as citizens in the making. Rather than guest workers, isn't it more American to set realistic immigration quotas and enforce them fairly?

The Honorable Joschka Fischer, member of the Bundestag, and former German Foreign Minister and Deputy Chancellor (1998-2005) in the government of Gerhard Schroeder, will offer a 2006 Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne policy lecture titled "Europe's Prospects in a Globalized World," on April 20, 2006, 4:30 p.m., Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall.

The Honorable Joschka Fischer's Biography:

In his State of the Union address in January, President Bush stressed the importance of improving math education. He proposed to "train 70,000 high school teachers to lead advanced placement courses in math and science, bring 30,000 math and science professionals to teach in classrooms, and give early help to students who struggle with math."

But where will these teachers come from? And will the training of teachers be sufficient to increase the number of students choosing math and science careers? And why does all this matter?

Because mathematics is the foundation of the natural sciences. It is no coincidence that Isaac Newton, the man who formulated the law of gravitational attraction that revolutionized our understanding of the universe, was also the man who popularized the calculus. And the natural sciences, however pure, are what give us airplanes, cable TV and the Internet.

In the 2003 Program for International Student Assessment, a test that measures math literacy, American 15-year-olds performed worse than their peers in 23 countries, as well as those in Hong Kong. It's not hard to see why. According to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 40 percent of the nation's middle school math teachers do not have the equivalent of an undergraduate minor in math. The average starting salary of a teacher is only $30,000, whereas the average starting salary for a recent college graduate in computer science or engineering is $50,000.

Short of following the British, who have proposed paying experienced math teachers more than $100,000, with a guaranteed minimum of $70,000, where will we find a way to attract the thousands of teachers George Bush wants?

New York State initiated an innovative program to bring teachers from Jamaica for two or four years to teach in New York schools. Jamaica, a developing nation where one U.S. dollar equals 65 Jamaican dollars, is nonetheless a stable, English-speaking nation with an unbroken democratic tradition; it stands poised to beat the United States in establishing the world's first Institute for Mathematical Methods in Counterterrorism. When teachers for the New York program were recruited on the campus of the University of the West Indies, recruiters found more experienced math and science teachers than they ever dreamed they would.

But you can have all the teachers in the world and still not inspire kids to learn math. My friend Autumn e-mailed me about her nephew, Joshua: "He's upset because he's asked several of the math teachers why math is important or what are certain formulas used for -- there has to be a use, correct?"

Autumn told her nephew about my work in counterterrorism and for the television crime drama "Numb3rs." Autumn reported, "He's told his math teachers about you as well, and about the show 'Numb3rs.' He's informing them that through something called lattice theory you are managing to fight terrorists -- all with math."

Mathematics is art, and should be appreciated for its beauty, not simply for its utility. But we cannot expect 11 year-olds to cherish totally order-disconnected topological spaces as much as professional mathematicians do.

As I first proposed in January 2005, television shows like "Numb3rs" (or "Medium") -- where the main characters are mathematicians -- could work with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics to show kids how math is really used; the council and Texas Instruments are now working together to use "Numb3rs" to promote math literacy in schools.

Another way to inspire kids is to relate mathematics to something they see every day. In order to excite students and draw funding to his school, school superintendent Ronald Ross of Roosevelt, N.Y., has begun looking into the idea of creating a curriculum involving math and counterterrorism. What kinds of topics would students learn?

The opening line of the Oscar-winning movie "A Beautiful Mind" is "Mathematicians won the war." During World War II, the mathematics underlying cryptography played an important role in military planning. Winston Churchill admired Alan Turing, the mathematician who had mastered the German codes, recognizing him as the man who had perhaps made the single greatest individual contribution to defeating Hitler.

At Los Alamos, the lab that built the atomic bomb, Cliff Joslyn uses lattice theory to mine data drawn from thousands of reports of terrorist-related activity to discover patterns and relationships that were previously in shadow.

Lattice theoretical methods developed at MIT tell us the probability that we have disabled a terrorist cell, based on how many men we have taken out and what rank they hold in the organization. Lauren McGough, a Massachusetts high school student, tested the accuracy of this model by getting her classmates to pretend they were terrorists, passing orders down a fictitious chain of command, essentially confirming what the theory predicts.

High school students could learn algebra, trigonometry, calculus and logic while also learning concrete applications involving homeland security. No longer would students yawn and ask, "What is math good for?" Beauty could defeat both terror and boredom.

Whatever you may think of the State of the Union address, when it comes to supporting math education, we should all see pi to pi. President Bush is correct when he says that mathematics education in America must improve if the United States is to stay economically competitive, but the stakes are much higher than that. During the Cold War, the United States would not have tolerated a military gap between itself and its adversaries. Yet today, with 61 percent of all U.S. doctorates in math going to foreigners (15 percent to Chinese), we readily accept a "math gap."

Dollar for dollar, the best defense against our adversaries' weapons of mass destruction may be our allies in the Americas, armed with weapons of math instruction.

Improving math education is not merely a smart idea. It is a matter of national security. Algebra is one revolutionary Islamic concept we cannot afford to neglect or ignore.

Before attacking Iraq in March 2003, the United States told the world that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program in defiance of the United Nations. That claim, used to justify the war, was based on assessments provided by the United States intelligence community. But as everyone now knows, those assessments were wrong. So Jeffrey T. Richelson's history of American nuclear intelligence, including our attempts to learn about Iraq's nuclear program, could hardly be more timely.

In "Spying on the Bomb," Richelson, the author of several books on American intelligence, has brought together a huge amount of information about Washington's efforts to track the nuclear weapons projects of other countries. He examines the nuclear projects of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China, France, Israel, India, South Africa, Taiwan, Libya, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea, as well as Iraq. Through interviews and declassified documents as well as secondary works, he sets out briefly what we currently know about those projects and compares that with assessments of the time.

This may sound like heavy going, but Richelson writes with admirable clarity. And along the way he has fascinating stories to tell: about plans to assassinate the German physicist Werner Heisenberg during World War II; about discussions in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations on the possibility of attacking Chinese nuclear installations; about Indian measures to evade the gaze of American reconnaissance satellites; and about the bureaucratic infighting over the estimates on Iraq.

The United States has put an enormous effort into gathering information about the nuclear projects of other countries. After World War II it equipped aircraft with special filters to pick up radioactive debris from nuclear tests for isotopic analysis. It created a network of stations around the world to register the seismic effects of nuclear explosions. Most important, in 1960 it began to launch reconnaissance satellites that could take detailed photographs of nuclear sites in the Soviet Union and China. Richelson occasionally speculates about the role of communications intercepts and of spies, but these appear from his account to have been much less important than the other methods of collecting information.

Through these means the United States has gathered a vast quantity of data, sometimes to surprising effect. Intelligence played a crucial role in the cold war, for instance, by reducing uncertainty about Soviet nuclear forces. Alongside such successes, however, there have been failures. One notable example concerned the first Soviet test, which took place in August 1949, much sooner than the C.I.A. had predicted. Another was the failure to detect Indian preparations for tests in May 1998, even though at an earlier time the United States, with the help of satellite intelligence, had managed to learn about preparations the Indians were making and to head off their tests.

But the most serious failure of all was in Iraq in 2003, because in no other case did the intelligence assessments serve as justification for the use of military force. The information needed for avoiding political surprise is one thing. That needed for preventive war is quite another, if only because of the consequences of making a mistake.

Beyond making the uncontroversial recommendation that "aggressive and inventive intelligence collection and analysis" should continue, Richelson draws no general conclusions. That is a pity, because his rich material points to issues that cry out for further analysis. He suggests in one or two cases that failures sprang from the mind-set of the intelligence community, but he does not elaborate on this point. He has little to say about relations between policy makers and the intelligence community, even though the quality of intelligence and the use made of it depend heavily on that relationship.

His focus is no less narrow in his discussion of foreign nuclear projects. He concentrates on the programs themselves, paying very little attention to their political context. Does that reflect a technological bias in nuclear intelligence? Would, for example, the prewar assessment of Iraqi nuclear capabilities have been more accurate if it had paid more attention to the broader political and economic circumstances of Hussein's regime?

The task of intelligence has become more complex than it was during the cold war. A single dominant nuclear opponent has now been replaced by a number of nuclear states, along with states and stateless terrorists that are aiming to get their hands on nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the technology needed for producing nuclear weapons has become easier to acquire.

Many critics believe the recent performance of the intelligence community shows it has not responded adequately to this new situation. Richelson does not have much to say on this question; nor does he discuss the likely impact of the current reforms, initiated in response to the Iraq war, on the quality of intelligence. His reticence may imply that he does not think reform is necessary. Still, it is disappointing that he does not draw on his historical survey to discuss whether new approaches are needed for dealing with nuclear threats, and, if so, what those new approaches might be.

"The United States is the most powerful since the Roman Empire," stated Stephen Walt, the Belfer Professor of International Affairs and academic dean of the John F. Kennedy School, Harvard University, delivering the 2005 Robert G. Wesson Lecture in International Relations Theory and Practice, at the Freeman Spogli Institute on November 16, 2005. America's unmatched power is therefore of great interest and concern to leaders in most other parts of the world, from President Putin in Russia, to President Chirac in France, and President Musharraf in Pakistan. For Americans, however, the key issue is how others are now responding to U.S. power.

Speaking before an audience of Stanford faculty, students, and the broader community, Professor Walt examined three interwoven themes: why other states do not welcome U.S. power; what are the main strategies available to them for dealing with American power? and what should the United States do in response?

As an integral part of his analysis, Walt showed opinion polls demonstrating a striking gap between American views of U.S. primacy and other countries' perceptions of the current U.S. role. For example, although the 2002 Pew Global Attitudes Project found that 79 percent of U.S. citizens believe it is good that "American ideas and customs are spreading around the world," and 70 percent think that U.S. foreign policy takes the interests of other states into account either "a great deal" or "a fair amount," overwhelming majorities overseas say the United States considers the interest of others "not much" or "not at all." Similarly, a 2005 BBC survey of 21 countries found only five, India, the Philippines, Poland, South Africa, and South Korea, where a majority of people had "positive" attitudes toward the United States.

There are three major sources of anti-Americanism, Walt explained. First, our sheer power makes other nations nervous. Second, there is a perceived sense of hypocrisy between our words and our actions. The case of nuclear weapons provides a vivid example. We preach nonproliferation, yet accord new respect and policy cooperation with newly nuclear states, such as India. Third, how the United States behaves in the world-what we do-invites antipathy. This latter point is abundantly clear in global opinion polls: Even in regions where anti-Americanism seems most strident, nations and individuals report that they do not object to our values or to what we stand for but rather to what we do.

Other nations, Walt pointed out, can choose a strategy of accommodation to our power or a strategy of resistance. Commonly adopted strategies of accommodation include 'bandwagoning," or realigning foreign policies with U.S. wishes, such as Libya's abandonment of nuclear weapons; "regional balancing"-using U.S. power to balance regional threats; "bonding" to curry favor with the United States; and "penetration," a strategy aimed at infiltrating the American political system to influence foreign policy outcomes.

In contrast, countries that choose to resist American power pursue five strategies:

"balancing" our power, alone or in alliance with others; "asymmetric responses," such as terrorism, which try to exploit specific areas of U.S. vulnerability; "blackmail," like North Korea's efforts to extract concessions from its nuclear weapons program; "balking," or tacit non-cooperation; and "delegitimizing," or attempts to turn others against the legitimacy of our actions or policies.

In light of the growing antipathy to U.S. primacy in so many parts of the world, Walt proposed three major courses of action to produce a more favorable response to U.S. power. First, he urged that we reduce American's military footprint abroad-and especially our ground force deployments-and return to a more traditional policy of regional balancing in cooperation with other nations. This policy would make greater use of American air and naval power and limit American intervention to cases where vital U.S. interests are threatened. Second, we should work harder to defend our international legitimacy and rebuild the U.S. image abroad, through a sustained campaign of public diplomacy and by keeping key American institutions-such as higher education-available to foreign visitors. Third, he advocated a more nuanced approach to America's traditional support for Israel, one that balances our genuine support for Israel's existence with the urgent need to bring a lasting settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"The more the United States uses its power in an overwhelming and capricious manner," Professor Walt warned, "the more the rest of the world will resist us." Conversely, the more the United States recognizes and respects the interests of others, while using its power to defend its own interests, the more other nations will welcome U.S. power. "The task we face," he advised, "is to rebuild the trust, admiration, and legitimacy the United States once enjoyed, so the rest of the world can focus not on taming U.S. power but on reaping the benefits it can bring."

Since the controversy over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad erupted, Europe's leaders have shown remarkable--and uncharacteristic--courage under fire. Refusing to apologize for the alleged slight to religious Muslims, a chorus of Continental voices has instead risen to the cartoons' defense, citing freedom of expression as the very essence of liberty, democracy and the European Way.

Unfortunately, free speech is about the weakest card in Europe's hand these days. An Austrian court's conviction and sentencing of the British historian David Irving to three years imprisonment for Holocaust denial is merely the most recent footnote to European hypocrisy on freedom of expression over the past decade.

The European Convention on Human Rights, which legally binds all EU states and supersedes domestic law, explicitly guarantees "the right to freedom of expression" including "the freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority."

This provision is in keeping not only with the U.S. Bill of Rights, but with the central instruments of international human rights law to which Europe and America claim adherence. Yet Europe's interpretation of free expression has diverged markedly from America's broad deference to First Amendment freedoms of speech, assembly and religion.

American courts have upheld the publication of false, even racist materials, the right of neo-Nazis to rally in Jewish neighborhoods, and the objections of some citizens to the Pledge of Allegiance and to school dress codes on religious grounds.

European governments, on the other hand, have consistently trampled analogous rights, outlawing publication of hate speech, trade in Nazi paraphernalia, and the wearing of distinctive religious clothing, to name but a few recent examples.

According to the Austrian court that convicted him on Monday, David Irving's offense was to have "denied, grossly played down, approved, or tried to excuse" the Holocaust in print or other media, in violation of a 1992 statute. Although he has not been tried at home in Britain, Irving was convicted and fined in Germany in 1995 for "inciting race hatred."

At best, Irving is a monumentally terrible historian, who, only after publishing dozens of books on World War II, read the notes of the Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann and came around to admitting that the Nazi genocide might actually have occurred. At worst, he is an artless but unrepentant bigot, on the model of America's David Duke or Austria's own Jörg Haider, but without any independent political power.

Why, then, is Irving's Holocaust denial, like other minority and extremist views in European society, of such great concern to lawmakers? If European governments want to guard against the repetition of genocide, they should actively educate their citizens in tolerance and respect for different cultures and beliefs, not gag those who express conflicting ideas.

Europe's suppression of free speech is guaranteed to spawn and incubate precisely the kind of bigotry and sectarian violence it is intended to prevent. Hounded for the unthinkable crime of publishing false history, David Irving appears almost heroic as he stands up to censorship, fines and imprisonment, making him a kind of martyr for neo-fascist groups.

Likewise, suppression of young Muslims' rights to dress or worship as their religion requires lends government sanction to already widespread anti- Muslim attitudes. This official xenophobia in turn breeds simmering resentment that has already exploded into mass violence and been manipulated by radical Islamists to recruit willing terrorist agents from within European society.

While European leaders should be praised for their belated conversion to the cause of free speech, outraged Muslims around the world are right to allege a double standard. Until Europe consistently respects its own guarantees of free expression, and actively promotes tolerance instead of clumsily stifling dissent, its brave rhetoric will ring disappointingly false.

His Excellency Sir David Manning, British Ambassador to the United States, delivered the 2006 Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecture: "Energy: A Burning Issue for Foreign Policy," on Monday, March 13, 2006 at 4:30 p.m. in the Bechtel Conference Center at Encina Hall.

Sir David Manning has been Her Majesty's Ambassador to the United States of America since September 2, 2003.

Sir David Manning's Biography:

2003 - present: Washington, USA (Ambassador)

2001 - 2003: Foreign Policy Adviser to the Prime Minister

2001: UK Delegation NATO Brussels (Ambassador)

1998 - 2000: Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Deputy Under-Secretary)

1995 - 1998: Tel Aviv, Israel (Ambassador)

1994 - 1995: Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Head of Policy Planning Staff)

1994:UK member of Contact Group on Bosnia (International Conference on Former Yugoslavia)

1993 - 1994: Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Head of Eastern Department)

1990 - 1993: Moscow, Russia (Counselor, Head of Political Department)

1988 - 1990: Counselor on loan to Cabinet Office

1984 - 1988: Paris, France (1st Secretary)

1982 - 1984: Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Deputy Head of Policy Planning Staff)

1980 - 1982: Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Soviet Department, later Eastern Department)

1977 - 1980: New Delhi, India (2nd later 1st Secretary)

1974 - 1977: Warsaw, Poland (3rd later 2nd Secretary)

1972 - 1974: Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Mexico/Central America Department)

1972: Entered Foreign and Commonwealth Office