(Colin) Powell: U.S. needs to restore its welcoming image

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Source: farmington independent


NEW ORLEANS – America needs to restore its image as the land of opportunity, rather than tightening its borders so that the world’s best and talented won’t come, former U.S. Secretary of State Collin Powell said here Monday.

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“The government has to protect its citizens, and that’s what we did,” Powell said as keynote speaker to the American Farm Bureau Federation annual convention in New Orleans. “We’re a lot safer now than we were before 9/11.”

But Powell said he went to President Bush about 1-1/2 years later and told him that “we can’t go too far because we have now paid too high a price for these new procedures.”

So many youngsters around the world, especially Muslim youth, stopped applying to attend U.S. universities, he said. People abroad with illnesses are not trying to seek treatment at the Mayo Clinic, and they aren’t coming to recreational facilities in the United States, Powell said. “We are starting to create an impression with the rest of the world that says, ‘we really don’t want to welcome you here anymore.”

That’s bad, he argues, because students that used to come here are going to France, Britain, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, “because it’s obvious you can get a quality education at these places now, and you don’t have to go to a place that seems not to welcome you, or hassles you at the airport.”

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