This clanging port city on the Rotte River is a study in European immigration. One-third of Rotterdam's population of 600,000 are minimally educated immigrants with little command of the Dutch language. If trends continue, according to a city government study, the non-native community will grow about 58 percent by 2017 - a dramatic demographic shift in a nation where half a century ago there were few foreigners.
I'm looking at immigration for my story, browsing at some different country cases. This one really affected me. It says so much about the collision of new fears about terrorism and buried xenophobic feelings in some European countries. I know personally, some distant relatives in Holland are worried that they will be deported to Afghanistan because the government is now relatively stable. That is the case in the US too. The illegal immigrants caught up in the special registration webs often are sent back to countries when it may not be safe for them. In the case of the Palestinians, there is no state to be sent back to. What strange times we live in ...
Tolerance, Fear Collide in Neatherlands, Los Angeles Times
Tolerance, fear collide in Netherlands
Some Dutch think immigrants threaten traditional way of life
By Jeffrey Fleishman
LOS ANGELES TIMES
ROTTERDAM, The Netherlands - The world lives on West Kruiskade Street: Turkish butchers slip into clean morning aprons, dreadlocks lift in the breeze and steam whirls from Chinese kitchens before vanishing amid scents of African spices and salted fish.
Then comes the night. Storefront shutters slam tight. The falafel boys shelve their pita bread, and girls in head scarves drift toward home in sputtering neon. It is the time of junkies and pickpockets and dark-skinned men with silver in their smiles.
The night worries the Dutch. Long considered one of Europe's most tolerant societies, the Netherlands these days is casting a harsh eye toward immigrants. In a move condemned by human-rights groups, the nation's parliament voted in February to deport 26,000 foreigners requesting political asylum. The decision underscores fears - amplified by the Madrid, Spain, bombings in March - that the nation is failing at integration and that poor, frustrated immigrant communities are threatening Dutch culture.
"The Dutch have become less tolerant," said John Kanton, who came here 40 years ago as a boy from Suriname. "The Madrid bombings have the Dutch thinking, 'Hey, what's going on? What's happening to our way of life?' "
Barry Madlener, a member of Livable Rotterdam, the dominant political party on the city council, isn't ashamed of feeling that way. "We have had this political correctness in Europe," he said. "But now there is anxiety and strange feelings about foreigners coming here who do not want to live in a Western way. ... We want the national government to say we as a country can only handle so many immigrants. We want zero immigrant growth."
This clanging port city on the Rotte River is a study in European immigration. One-third of Rotterdam's population of 600,000 are minimally educated immigrants with little command of the Dutch language. If trends continue, according to a city government study, the non-native community will grow about 58 percent by 2017 - a dramatic demographic shift in a nation where half a century ago there were few foreigners.
As a young man, Kanton boxed on these streets of cawing seagulls and grizzled brick.
His father brought the family to help rebuild a city splintered by World War II. The Kantons now own five boxing-equipment stores - all named Hercules - throughout the Netherlands. Coils of gray in his hair, Kanton, 45, is a well-built middleweight. He speaks Dutch, German and English. He understands Turkish.
One needs such skills to navigate the syntaxes on West Kruiskade, which is as much a street as it is a narrative of changing cultures.
"You have Chinese, Moroccan, Portuguese," he said, walking toward a boxing event poster on his wall. "Look at these fighters. Turkish. Yugoslav. Suriname. Everyone comes to this street. Rents are cheap, and over the years you can watch the different groups come and go."
He glanced out the window. So many sepia-colored faces, many of them adrift between their native land and their new home. Discrimination, said Kanton, is the subtle, polite kind, like a murmur of elevator music in the background of Dutch society.
"When I first came, there were mainly just immigrants from Italy and Spain," he said. "But now you've got them from all kinds of countries, and that makes a difference."
The Netherlands welcomed guest workers in the 1960s and 1970s. And the Dutch, priding themselves on human rights, accepted tens of thousands of refugees and asylum-seekers escaping wars and turmoil in Iraq, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Africa and Afghanistan. Thousands of petitions for asylum have been rejected over the years, but the Dutch government did not have a clear policy on repatriation. The new asylum law - opposed by the nation's churches - will deport 26,000 people over the next three years.
The quandary over the fate of asylum-seekers coincides with rising unemployment and crime in immigrant communities. Criminals with foreign backgrounds make up 55 percent of the country's prison population. The unemployment rate for non-Western immigrants is 14 percent compared to a 4-percent rate among the native Dutch population. Joblessness among Moroccans and Turks, two of the largest minorities, went from a ratio of one unemployed for every 11 workers in 2001 to one in six in 2003.
Many in this country of tulips and marijuana cafes think their liberal values are colliding with other disturbing forces. A number of Muslims have been investigated for alleged links to terrorist organizations since Sept. 11.
"Europeans don't like us anymore," said Said Kallah, 27, a Moroccan shopkeeper on West Kruiskade Street, whose father immigrated to Rotterdam in the 1970s. "They're afraid of us. 'The Muslims did this. The Muslims did that.' They needed us to help rebuild after the world war. Now, they don't.... I never felt Dutch because they never let me feel Dutch."
Posted by Roya Aziz at April 19, 2004 10:26 PMThis is an excellent story ROya, and a very real problem.
Posted by: Francis Pisani at April 20, 2004 12:13 PM