The Czechs, perhaps even twitchier than the Poles are about foreigners, may demand an even longer sales-to-foreigners exemption.
It merged with Far East Bank to form the largest local lender, and tied up with Singapore's DBS to lift regional operations, even as domestic banking opens up further to foreigners.
The government even brought forward plans to allow foreigners to buy up to half the shares in South Korean companies, but again there were virtually no takers.
The Greens had wanted to go even further, and give citizenship to all children born to foreigners with residence permits.
Nor is this simply because migrants favour migrants: even British-born white Londoners are friendlier to foreigners than other Britons.
Those who doubt the UK government's case, set out on Tuesday, for building a line between London and Birmingham are going to be even more doubtful about the benefits of a colossally expensive link to help out the potential foreigners north of Gretna.
For any society, even Spain, which has a reputation for being generally open and friendly to foreigners, that is a big adjustment.
Educators feared that all courses below university level might be ruled off limits to overseas students, even though between 40% and 50% of foreigners at British universities had taken an earlier course in Britain, usually to hone language or study skills.
So they are keen to create national champions in other sectors, even if they are partly controlled by foreigners.
"For foreigners, it is really frightening to be under sea level, and even more frightening to have the collection below sea level, " says Pijbes.
Even seemingly random databases, like "Names of Foreigners Who Took the Oath of Allegiance to the Province and State of Pennsylvania, 1727 to 1775, " are available on Ancestry.com, in some cases behind a pay wall.
For starters, the lack of a decent recovery means that the Bank of England may have to loosen monetary policy even further this year, meaning that the market interest rate that foreigners can earn holding sterling will stay very low.
But even in the new borderless world of the European Union, foreigners are still foreigners and liable to sweat for it.
Mexico's constitution contains many provisions to protect the country from foreigners, including foreigners legally resident in the country and even foreign-born people who have become naturalized Mexican citizens.
Foreigners and moneyed local residents who even three or four years ago would have hesitated to hail a taxi in the street or walk around after dark now do both without thinking twice.
And most figures even of foreigners are by-products of data gathered, by separate agencies, for other reasons, not to measure the flow or stock of migrants.
In many cases they or their heirs still hold the title deeds, even though the property has been seized by Turkish-Cypriots, developed or, in some cases, sold to foreigners.
While camp life is hardly cosmopolitan, some of the young can meet foreigners, have access to the Internet and occasionally slip out to a nearby town, or even the shopping malls and bright lights of Bangkok, Thailand's capital.
But Mr Laar, a talkative man in a taciturn nation, sometimes seems better at burnishing his country's image to foreigners than at connecting with his own people, many of whom think of him as glib, even slippery.
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