Steve Earle lived in Nashville for three decades before relocating to New York. In February 2008 he appeared on BBC2's Later... program where prior to performing it he told presenter Jools Holland that he wrote this song because every great city in the world had been built by immigrants, and hinted that he was unhappy with the policies of the Bush Administration towards immigration, which had naturally been tightened up since the atrocities of September 11, 2001 and the current wave of Islamic sponsored terror sweeping the Western world. >>