I’m feeling vitriolic today, so here’s a little story: A friend of mine was walking along the street here in Freiburg the other day. She saw a middle-aged woman in a fur coat walking along the street as well. This woman had a little paper bag from a bakery. The woman took her pastry out of the bag so that she could eat it, then deliberately tossed the paper bag on the sidewalk and continued on her way.

Now, at the same time, we have the following situation: in Spain there were huge race riots in the past week because some very violent, vocal people in Spain want the Moroccans out of Spain. The Germans let foreigners in (because they have to) and then get on television to talk about how they wish all the foreigners would leave again. And Austria…well, I don’t even need to go there.

What does the woman with the bag have to do with groups of foreigners living in Western Europe? I’ll tell you. If you are a Moroccan in Spain, a Turk in Germany, or anything other than Austrian in Austria, chances are that, if you get a job, you will get a crap job. Literally. In Germany, anyway, it’s the foreigners who clean the stairwells, clean the streets, clean the hotels and clean the toilets. It’s the foreigners who pick the fruit and vegetables. It’s the foreigners work on building sites or pave roads.

It’s the foreigners who clean up the mess that people who can afford fur coats leave behind without a second thought. And it seems to be people who can afford fur coats who are the first to jump up and say that all the foreigners should leave because they’re taking good German-Spanish-Austrian jobs.

And this has led me to hope that one day, all these foreigners with these great jobs really will leave. I wish they would all go back home, all of a sudden, all at once. I wish they would all drop their jobs and take off, even if it was just for a month or so, because I would love to see just how far countries like Germany or Spain or Austria would get without them.

I can guess how far they would get: they’d get nowhere. Their fruits and vegetables would rot in the fields. Their building sites would be deserted. They would all be buried in their own garbage. And you know why? Because the jobs that foreigners do are the jobs that the Germans-Spaniards-Austrians think are beneath them to do themselves.

So maybe it’s not so much that the Germans, say, really want all the foreigners to leave. They just want them to be invisible. They want the foreigners to do their lousy jobs and then go back to their little ghettos, and they don’t want to hear anything about integration or dual citizenship or, God forbid, even more foreigners coming into the country. They don’t want to know where their fruit comes from, and they don’t want to know where their garbage goes to. They want to go about their lives with the invisible hands of invisible people doing the invisible and thankless jobs that make Germany the clean, comfortable, well-fed country that it is.

And it’s the invisible people, ironically enough, that help make Germany the kind of country that the Germans want to keep all to themselves.