What Hath Toby Young Wrought? A sociological examination of the Brit expat in New York:

These ex-Brits who have settled in the rent-stabilized margins of Manhattan aren't our brightest and our best—they are our remittance men, paid to leave. Not like the other immigrants, who made it here as the cleverest, most adventurous in the village. What you get are our failures and fantasists. The freshly redundant. The exposed and embittered. No matter how long they stay here, they don't mellow, their consonants don't soften. They don't relax into being another local. They become ever more English. Über-Brits. Spiteful, prickly things in worn tweed, clutching crossword puzzles, gritting their Elizabethan teeth, soup-spotted, tomb-breathed, loud and deaf. The most reprehensible and disgusting of all human things; the self-made, knowing English eccentric. Eccentricity is the last resort of the expat. The petit fou excuse for rudeness, hopelessness, self-obsession, failure, and never, ever picking up the check.

--A.A. Gill, in the April 2007 Vanity Fair. When the magazine that historically genuflected at the altar of all-things-British suddenly declares a fatwa against the island, you know the zeitgeist has shifted. No Brit should receive a Green Card to this country unless they're willing to pick crops for two years.