Mr. President, please, no more Norwegians! | Signe Wilkinson

The summer before last, my family spent two weeks investigating Norway and I can say with some certainty that we do not want more Norwegians coming to the United States.

For starters, they are just too darned good-looking. The middle-aged hostesses on our Norwegian airlines were more beautiful than Scarlett Johansson.  No one has any detectable body fat so they look good in whatever they wear.  Even the Norwegians who appear to have come from shithole countries look great and the bi-racial young people we saw working in museums, stores and cafes were stunning. I mean, even more beautiful than anyone on Philadelphia City Council.

Letting in too many gorgeous people will damage our already rocky self-esteem and we'll have to listen to more Oprahs and Dr. Dans telling us how to deal with it. Norwegians, by the way, deal with it by vacationing in Greece.

Secondly, they apparently know how to run a country. Not only do they have universal health care, six-week vacations and an excellent school system, but their public transportation is superb. Their cities and towns are amazingly clean, although it's true, that, as a tourist, we didn't hang out a lot on the gritty side of the tracks.  I was secretly glad to see, however, that the walls along the tracks we traveled were lined with subpar graffiti. Made me feel at home.

I know, I know. It's a small country — only 5.26 million beautiful people — and if they let French people in, as Philadelphia used to do, or others from more southern countries, the place would probably go to heck.  There are other downsides. They didn't seem to have much  by way of an Americans With Disabilities Act.  There's a step up from the platform to their modern train cars that don't kneel or have magic ramps.  Instead, when an elderly lady couldn't manage it, random Norwegians on the track stepped in and gently picked her up by her elbows and helped her get situated in the car with her baggage. While that method warmed my inner Libertarian, I'm not sure it would work on SEPTA.

Another downside was that the country is brimming with Teslas. We were told that their purchase was subsidized.  There were electric charging stations all over the place. They have 233,569 Tesla Superchargers per 1,000,000,000 beating out Denmark which only has 70,926 per. Really, it doesn't speak well of a country to be assisting Elon Musk in any possible way. Still that's the kind of thing they do to keep their carbon footprint down.

One other reason President Trump might reconsider his sudden Norwegian enthusiasm is that immigrants from Norway, and nearby countries like it, have come here and produced female editorial cartoonists! I'm one quarter Norwegian blood. Ann Telnaes, the most brilliant and most caustic Trump caricaturist, is of Norwegian stock (plus lived in Sweden) and Jen Sorensen, whose drawing pen is a Viking spear, descended from the Danish.

Still, in an effort to help my president make America Scandinavian again, I invited my tall, svelte, handsome Norwegian cartooning colleague, Roar Hagen and his tall, svelte, beautiful wife, to move to America.  His response: "I love America and Americans. But life here is, except the climate, quite good."

So, Mr. President, if you really want more Norskies, all you have to do is guarantee free universal health care, decent vacations, environmentally friendly transportation and great schools that teach everyone how to speak, write, and read English better than we do.

That would, indeed, improve our country.