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Europe Divided On Muslim Immigration
By Randall Parker at 2005 February 27 01:09 PM
Immigration Culture Clash | TrackBack
The New York Times has an awfully politically incorrect headline on an article about Dutch who are fleeing their country: "More Dutch Plan to Emigrate as Muslim Influx Tips Scales"
This small nation is a magnet for immigrants, but statistics suggest there is a quickening flight of the white middle class. Dutch people pulling up roots said they felt a general pessimism about their small and crowded country and about the social tensions that had grown along with the waves of newcomers, most of them Muslims. "The Dutch are living in a kind of pressure cooker atmosphere," Mr. Hiltemann said.
Foreign born are 10% of the population of the Netherlands. Immigrants commit an outsized proportion of crimes.
Immigrant youths now make up half the prison population. More than 40 percent of immigrants receive some form of government assistance, a source of resentment among native Dutch. Immigrants say, though, that they are widely discriminated against.
If the second and later generation descendants of immigrants were included in the crime figures the picture would no doubt be even bleaker. Of coursethe immigrants are reproducing much miore rapidly than the Dutch. The Dutch should stop committing national suicide. They should put an end to all immigration.
Muslims are threatening and intimidating people who criticise Islam in Holland.
A screening of Theo van Gogh's film 'Submission', scheduled for the Rotterdam film festival was cancelled by the producer of his film company, Gijs van Westerlaken, for 'security reasons. Ironically, the far left Groen Links and Socialist party joined forces with the Christian Democrats to petition the Justice Minister to insist the film be shown in order not to hand a victory to the terrorists.The decision not to show the film was widely criticised both in Holland and abroad, and seen as a victory for the terrorists,who are trying to impose Islamic law on Dutch society.
The Sunday Times of London has a great and rather long article about immigration in Europe which I highly recommend you read in full. Polls of Muslims in Holland about the 9/11 attacks helped catalyze the shift of Dutch positions away from tolerance of immigrants and this shift allowed Pim Fortuyn to launch his political career.
The consensus has shifted across the board. In a country that can still seem a parody of itself — a magistrate ruled recently that an armed robber was entitled to a tax rebate on the cost of his gun as a tool of his trade — even the leader of the Green party has called for it to be illegal for Muslims to import spouses through arranged marriages. Integrated teams, drawn from the police, social welfare and housing offices, are used to locate and arrest illegals. Social welfare knows who is drawing benefit, housing offices have addresses, and police check for criminal records. The number of asylum seekers has been slashed from 43,000 to 10,000 a year, nine-tenths of whom have their applications rejected.
Multiculturalism is damned. A recent poll found 80% in favour of stronger measures to get immigrants to integrate — and 40% said they "hoped" Muslims "no longer feel at home here".
How did this happen? The first open shift came in 2001, with 9/11. Frits Bolkestein, the leader of the VVD Conservative Liberals, had struck a chord in the 1990s with his insistence that immigrants conform to western culture, but immigration issues were largely the preserve of "racists" and "crypto-Nazis" on the political margins.
Then came reports that the atrocities in New York and Washington had been greeted with cheers in parts of Rotterdam. Forum, the Dutch institute for multicultural development, commissioned an opinion poll of Dutch Muslims. It showed that 48% had "complete understanding" and 27% "some understanding" of the attacks. Overall, only 62% disapproved. Wim Kok, the then prime minister, expressed his shock. The poll was said to be "unbalanced".
Another was held. This found that, although only a small number of Turkish and Surinamese Muslims supported the attacks, 26% of ethnic Moroccans approved of them.
Facts about the Muslim Moroccan immigrant assassin of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh call into question the argument for assimilation as the solution. Van Gogh's assassin could write excellent Dutch and even had adopted some Dutch cultural practices.
The murder forced another highly sensitive issue — religion — into the mix. The Dutch were brought face to face with the disturbing fact that a full-blown jihadist group had grown up in their midst, and that it was locally born and recruited. It was, they say, their own 9/11. Van Gogh's alleged assassin, Mohammed B, a 26-year-old Dutch Moroccan, spoke and wrote excellent Dutch. The farewell letter found on him when he was arrested was written in rhyming couplets, in the style that Dutch families send to one another each Sinterklaas (Santa Claus) Day, December 5. He had studied at a well-regarded lyceum before dropping out of a technical institute.
He then started spending time at the Al-Tawhid mosque in Amsterdam. At some stage he joined a militant Islamic group, the Hofstad group, named after the Hague, where it was based. It was led by Redouan al-Issa, alias Abu Khaled, a Syrian-born geologist turned spiritual leader. Mohammed B's friends included Samir Azzouz, an 18-year-old radical later arrested for plotting to bomb Schiphol airport and the Dutch parliament.
Slums and poverty played no part in Mohammed B's background. He grew up in pleasant, low-rise housing in west Amsterdam, graffiti-free, with open spaces and playgrounds. When arrested, he was living in good council housing. The street has small, modern houses, with well-tended gardens, the hedges trimmed, and a heron often standing on a rooftop. Lace curtains mark the Dutch houses; satellite dishes are the ubiquitous indicator of immigrants.
Well, Muslim kids will be Muslim kids. Playing around at blowing up Parliaments and airports, killing documentary filmmakers, all the regular stuff associated with growing up as a Muslim boy around non-Muslim populations. This is to be expected. Why do people make such a big deal of it? Oh right, the whole thing about the non-Muslims expecting more respect. But they are non-Muslims. How can they be expected to be treated as equals by Muslims? Of course many young Muslim hotheads will outgrow this youthful stage and develop greater ambitions like becoming a middle manager of terrorist cells or even a chief executive of a terrorist organization or, for those who want a more publically visible role as a pillar of the community, becoming a firebrand preacher rallying the next generation to Jihad at the local mosque. Some of the technically more adept may get into administering Islamist jihad websites. Even those caught committing crimes against non-believers can serve the constructive purpose of recruiting more Muslims to Jihad in the prisons.
In Holland, unlike in the mainstream media in America, higher rates of use of government entitlements is seen as a sign that immigrants just may not be vital to the economy.
The debate can be highly sensitive. Ethnic minorities account for 40% of social-security recipients, with a rate six times higher than for the native Dutch. They have a high unemployment rate, and they make up a large majority of the prison population. This is seen as undermining the accepted wisdom that immigrants are vital to the economy.
How could such a thing be true if a reigning national mythology of America is that immigration made America great and immigration is always a boon for existing Americans? Could it be that the people peddling this mythology are intellectual con artists peddling an agenda for their own economic or political or ethnic group interests? Could the mythology about immigration be a bright shining lie?
Well, here's an obviously anti-family policy: By letting Dutch Muslims to bring in spouses to marry they are encouraging a policy that causes marriages to end in divorce.
It includes marriage patterns. Three-quarters of young Muslims, including those who are Dutch born, marry a partner from their country of origin. "It's often a cash transaction," Wilders claims. "Two-thirds of them divorce after three years — the minimum period for the spouse to get the right of residence."
So the asylum root into Holland has been pretty much cut off. But the marriage route is alive and thriving. I bet a Moroccan Muslim in the Netherlands could marry a series of foreign partners to bring in many people. Oh, and they allow family reunification immigrants. So bring in the brother or son or mother. This allows chain immigration just as happens in the United States. Chain immigration should be brought to an end.
While Holland is cracking down Spain is being supremely stupid about immigration.
And what of the EU? "Migration has to be managed at a European level," Aboutaleb says. "But there is no common sense on asylum or illegals," he adds. Because EU passports are recognised throughout the union, the action of one country in accepting — or refusing — migrants affects others.
Aboutaleb cites Spain as an example. In 2000, it had an amnesty of 250,000 sin papeles (illegals). This month, at a time of increasing controls elsewhere, it announced another amnesty. "Spain has perhaps a million illegals, in agriculture and construction," Aboutaleb says. "The moment they get an EU passport, they can move all over Europe.
Predictably lots of people are flowing into Spain from within and outside of Europe with false papers trying to get in on the Spanish amnesty.
The mandarins in Brussels and some of the national governments are still intent on collective cultural suicide. The recent decision in Brussels to begin accession talks to make Muslim Turkey a member of the EU is folly on an enormous scale. But populations (and even some politicians) in some of the member states (most notably Holland and Denmark) are turning hard against immigration and against Muslim immigration in particular.
German publisher Mathias Dúpfner says that Europe is pursuing the same policy of appeasement toward Muslims that Europe pursued toward Hitler: appeasement.
Is Europe giving way to blackmail? The question was raised in Germany last month by an article in Die Welt, the country's most heavyweight paper, by Mathias Dúpfner, head of the big Axel Springer publishing group. He titled it Europe — Thy Name Is Cowardice. He said that a crusade is under way "by fanatic Muslims, focused on civilians, directed against our free, open western societies" that is set upon the "utter destruction" of western civilisation. This enemy, he said, was spurred on by "tolerance" and "accommodation", which were taken as signs of weakness. Europe's supine response, he said, was on a par with the appeasement of Hitler.
Can "The Death Of The West" be prevented? As demonstrated by the Theo Van Gogh murder it depends in part on the tactics adopted by the most extreme Muslims. Barring big shocks that wake people up to the damage that immigration is doing to Europe there is a tendency to slowly acclimate to gradually worsening conditions. Leftists who hate their own societies have been only too willing to rationalize and excuse the behavior of immigrants. Business interests that are interested in cheap labor provide another pillar of support for immigration that is a net harm to societies. To repeat a quote from James Q. Wilson
The great achievement of Western culture since the Enlightenment is to make many of us peer over the wall and grant some respect to people outside it; the great failure of Western culture is to deny that walls are inevitable or important.
Update: Jews in Europe are joining immigration restrictionist parties over fears of Muslim immigrants.
A curious thing is happening in Belgium these days: a small but vocal number of Jews are supporting a far-right party whose founders were Nazi collaborators. The xenophobic party, Vlaams Belang, plays on fears of Arab immigrants and, unlike the prewar parties from which it is descended, courts Jewish votes. Perhaps 5 percent of the city of Antwerp's Jews gave it their votes in the last election.
The Belgian example is extreme, but it represents the sharpest edge of a much broader political shift by European Jews - away from the left, particularly the far left, and toward the center and right, in the face of rising displays of anti-Semitism and the European left's embrace of the Palestinian cause.
Vlaams Belang is the reborn Vlaams Blok party which the leftists in power in Belgium banned. Political freedom in Belgium is pretty limited if you are not left-wing.
