It was a week when immigrants, potential immigrants and immigration were much in the news, from reaction to Kofi Annan's appeal before the European Parliament for a more positive attitude to foreign workers, through further pressure for restrictions on job-seekers from the accession states and on to the tragic deaths of 19 Chinese workers in Britain's Morecambe Bay on Thursday night.
For Ian Black in the Guardian, Annan's Brussels speech was "blunt and electrifying", chastising governments for insisting on seeing migrants as a problem rather than "a solution to their own plummeting birth rates, pensions crises and ageing societies".
"In its flattering self-image," he wrote, "the EU likes to see itself as the embodiment of multilateralism, doing things for the common good while frowning on narrow national self-interest.
"But big countries still prefer to handle immigration and asylum alone and are reluctant to act at EU level unless it is in the direction of a 'fortress Europe', limiting numbers and looking for ways to return asylum seekers and benefits 'scroungers' to 'safe' destinations."
Hamburg's Der Spiegel painted an alarming picture of the corruption endemic in the societies of central and eastern Europe, or as it preferred to call the region, "Baksheeshistan, the kingdom of the kleptocrats".
"A week scarcely passes in central and eastern Europe," the magazine wrote, "in which a case of corruption doesn't break out whose ramifications extend to the highest levels of power."
The 2003 report of the NGO Transparency International, which studies corruption levels throughout the world, attested to a worsening of the situation as compared with the previous year in practically every EU accession state, Spiegel said.
Poland was the worst affected in this regard, slipping 19 places to 64th out of 133, making it more corrupt than Cuba, Botswana or Brazil.
Romania, which hopes to enter the EU in 2007, was further down still, at about the same level as Malawi.
These countries' best, or possibly only, hope of tackling corruption would come with EU entry and the inspection regime that membership would entail, the report stressed.
Yet Spiegel's accusations came at a time when western Europe itself seemed to be walking out in less than shining raiment.
Given a suspended sentence of 18 months for corrupt funding of his political party, the RPR, on January 30th, former French prime minister Alain Juppé decided this week to appeal the verdict and to remain active in politics at least until that appeal is decided.
In this he had the support of many of his political colleagues, one of whom thought it outrageous that "a person of this quality could be treated as a criminal", while another denounced the "disproportionate, hypocritical and cynical" decision of the judges.
All of which led Le Monde to quote with approval the analysis of the president of the French magistrates' association, Dominique Barella: "This affair demonstrates that France is a country in which democracy is still only developing and whose elected politicians have not yet internalised the idea of the independence of the judiciary."
Mr Juppé also had the support of many of his fellow conservatives in the European People's Party as they met last week in Brussels.
Angela Merkel, the German CDU leader, offered him her heartfelt greetings, Berlin's Die Tageszeitung reported, while Rome's l'Unità quoted Silvio Berlusconi, at the same gathering, as sending a "message of solidarity" to his French friend whom he saw as, like himself, the innocent victim of a politicised (communist) judiciary. Die Tageszeitung, wondering if in fact France should be considered a banana republic, did not agree.
Political corruption, it found, was commonplace in the neighbouring state under governments of either colour and if brought to light attracted only the mildest punishment.
The main beneficiaries of the Juppé affair, the paper added, were sure to be the extreme rightists of the National Front.
A week in which Tony Blair responded to fears that immigrants from central and eastern Europe might flood in to exploit Britain's welfare system saw the deaths, in horrific circumstances, of immigrants from further afield who were not so much exploiting as being exploited.
Tony Woodley, general secretary of the TGWU, writing in the Guardian, laid the blame for these deaths on "cowboy capitalism" and the so-called "gangmasters" who supply British entrepreneurs, particularly in the agriculture and processing sectors, with cheap, illegal and above all powerless labour.
Government, Woodley argued, had a responsibility to regulate this area but the unions also had their duties.
"The British labour movement has a responsibility to tackle this crisis. If we do not reach out to the super-exploited, then who will?" Local MP Geraldine Smith told the Daily Mirror the cockles on Morecambe beach were worth £6 million, though the Chinese cockle-pickers were getting very little of that. Just how little that was began to emerge on Saturday - £1 per nine-hour day according to one investigating police officer.