Here is a link from Slate magazine that details how various European countries are collapsing to Muslim immigration through lack of will:
http://www.slate.com/id/2201909/entry/2201911/
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands—When Dutch politician Geert Wilders announced in November 2007 that he was releasing a film about the Quran, the government girded itself for potential catastrophe. Wilders, who sports a bleached-blond bouffant hairdo, has likened the Quran to Mein Kampf and called for it to be banned. His film was sure to offend Muslim sensibilities—and the Dutch had already experienced, in a visceral way, what a provocative film about the Muslim faith can unleash.
Four years ago, a radical Dutch-Moroccan murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh after he released a short documentary criticizing the treatment of women under Islam. Pinned to van Gogh's chest with a knife was a letter threatening the filmmaker's collaborator, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Wilders received his own share of "you're next" warnings; both he and Ali have been under heavy police protection ever since.
Van Gogh's brutal killing prodded a fundamental change in the Netherlands' immigration laws. It came just two years after another convulsive event—the murder of populist politician Pim Fortuyn, who had advocated halting all immigration into the Netherlands. It was the first political assassination in Holland in more than 300 years, and it deeply shook Dutch society. Conservative parties were swept into power in the national election immediately after the killing of Fortuyn. The vicious attack on van Gogh bolstered the government's mandate to crack down—and former Minister for Immigration and Integration Rita Verdonk (popularly known as "Iron Rita") made the most of the opportunity.
Moroccan Immigrants Welcoming to Dutch to Took Them In
Declaring the days of "cozy tea drinking" with Muslim groups to be over, Verdonk ushered in a series of reforms that stanched immigration from Morocco and Turkey. Holland had imported workers from those countries in the 1960s and early '70s, and although the guest-worker program was discontinued in the mid-1970s, family reunification and, more recently, marriages between Dutch residents and people from their ancestral homelands sustained the migratory flow. Approximately 10 percent of Holland's 16.4 million inhabitants have non-Western roots, and about 1 million of these residents are Muslim.
Verdonk didn't explicitly slam the door on people from countries with large Muslim populations. But since March 2006, immigrants from the developing world—essentially, outside of Europe, the United States, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and Australia—have been required to sit for a Dutch-language test and a culture exam. The culture component includes a video featuring nudity and homosexuality. Presumably, most people watching the film keep their cool even if what they see offends their religious sensibilities. The language test, however, proved to be a real hurdle for many aspiring Dutch residents. Visa applications dropped by one-third, and about one-tenth of the people who sit for the exam flunk it. According to Dutch government statistics, immigration from Turkey and Morocco has declined by 60 percent since 2003.
Moroccan Immigrant
Those figures could soon creep back upward, however: This summer, a district court in the Netherlands held that men and women seeking to move to Holland to be reunited with family did not have to sit for the exam because the authorizing legislation did not explicitly mention it in the clause referring to family reunification. That means the target of Verdonk's initiative—the spouses of guest workers and their descendants—will no longer have to demonstrate minimum proficiency in Dutch in order to move to the Netherlands. Groups like Human Rights Watch lauded the decision. But even Dutch citizens who don't share Verdonk's politics can see the rationale. When Verdonk pointed out that there were some 600,000 people living in the Netherlands who didn't speak Dutch, no one needed to be told whom she was referring to. Senay Ozdemir, editor of a magazine for Muslim women, points out that the isolation many young brides from Turkey and Morocco experience makes it hard for them to adjust to Dutch society. "These women oftentimes have an idealized vision of what their lives will be like in Holland," she says. "They heard other stories about Europe and the Netherlands, that they would be free and live in a rich way." The reality of being cordoned off in immigrant neighborhoods and being largely dependent on their spouses can come as a shock—and, of course, makes the women particularly vulnerable to abuse.
One impact of Verdonk's reforms over the last two years has been to change the profile of immigrants to the Netherlands. The country is now a net exporter of people. Of the 117,000 people who settled in the country in 2007, the majority were either returning Dutch citizens or citizens of countries like Poland, Germany, and Bulgaria. As EU citizens, these men and women have an automatic right to live in Holland, although Bulgarians do not, as yet, have permission to work there.
Verdonk's approach didn't just change the profile of foreigners settling in the Netherlands—it also had an effect on immigrants who had been living in the country for decades. In particular, there are signs that the anti-immigrant tone behind the new laws polarized some citizens of foreign descent. At the Vrije University in Amsterdam, I met a number of students who wore head scarves even though their mothers did not. One woman who did not cover her head told me that her younger sister had elected to do so after anti-Muslim rhetoric reached a crescendo two years ago. Abdou Menebhi, chairman of Emcemo, a Moroccan interest group in Amsterdam, said it was common for second- and third-generation immigrants to embrace an Islamic identity in a way their parents hadn't. "They are experiencing a crisis of identity," he said. "And they are more willing than their parents to react to the prejudice they feel."
Their parents found a society governed by a more laissez faire ethos. For most of the last half-century, there was a taboo on criticizing people of a different ethic origin. That had a lot to do with a guilty national conscience: About three-quarters of Holland's Jews died in the Holocaust, one of the highest percentages in Western Europe. That painful reckoning was one reason the Dutch instituted liberal laws not only regarding rights for women and gays but also in accepting foreigners.
The statute of limitations on World War II guilt appears to have run out after the murders of Fortuyn and van Gogh. Still, the Dutch didn't embrace some of Verdonk's more extreme ideas, like banning the speaking of foreign languages on the street. Verdonk was forced to give up her Cabinet post in February 2007 when her party fared poorly in national elections and the fraught rhetoric around immigration died down in the aftermath. Wilders' video was not as provocative as he'd led people to believe. The grand mufti of Syria had warned of "war and bloodshed" if the Quran were defaced on-screen. Wilders avoided doing so explicitly. There were no significant disturbances on the streets of the Netherlands to protest his work. For the time being, at least, the Dutch appear to have achieved an uneasy truce over immigration.
Nonetheless, the legacy of the Netherlands' guest-worker program has made for a riven society. Across Europe—and the United States—immigrants often live in self-contained worlds. But here their isolation is particularly jarring.
The Jan Galenstraat neighborhood is just 20 minutes away from the center of Amsterdam, but it feels very far from the tony restaurants and gezellig homes most visitors associate with the nation's most-visited city. Drab brown high-rises stand behind tall gates. Few pedestrians walk the streets. What is most striking, however, are the gray satellite dishes that hang from virtually every balcony. This ubiquitous appendage has earned these neighborhoods the moniker "satellite cities." The dishes receive programming from Morocco and Turkey, allowing expatriates to feel they are still connected to their homelands even as they live a continent away.
VIENNA, Austria—In the fall of 2007, Arigona Zogaj became such a well-known figure in Austria that people referred to the 15-year-old by her first name. Her prominence wasn't due to a hit record or a modeling triumph—some of the more common reasons teenagers become famous. It was because she defied the Austrian government.
Instead of complying with a deportation order that would have sent the ethnic Albanian back to Kosovo, Arigona went into hiding. She subsequently appeared in a video that was broadcast on national television in which she threatened to commit suicide if she was forced out of the country she had called home for five years. The public rallied around the teenager, and eventually she was permitted to stay, albeit on a temporary basis: In December 2007, an Austrian court ruled that Arigona will have to leave the country when she finishes high school.
Arigona may have received outsized attention, but the hard-line approach the government brought to her case is not unusual. A little more than a year ago, I met a Chechen woman in Vienna whose 10-year-old son was forcibly removed from his elementary school by the police after the family's asylum application was denied.
As you might infer from those examples, Austria has some of the toughest immigration laws in Europe. The country's rules for entry are a Russian doll of quotas. The federal government caps the number of non-EU citizens who can move to Austria every year. (In 2006, the limit was 7,000 people—that figure included both skilled professionals and immigrants wishing to join family members already living in the country.) Then the nine provincial governments set limits on the number of foreigners who can live in their geographic regions.
Of course, because Austria is part of the European Union, most Western Europeans have the right to work and live there. However, residents of 12 countries that joined the European Union in 2004 and 2007—including Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Romania—have been barred from seeking employment in Austria. The Austrian and German governments were particularly insistent on the work curbs, and both countries announced they will maintain them for the maximum period allowed, until 2011.
The idea, of course, is to ensure that Eastern Europeans willing to work for lower wages will not flood the Austrian job market. There is also a law explicitly aimed at reserving jobs for Austrians: Foreign nationals (aside from most Western Europeans) cannot make up more than 9 percent of the country's work force. That figure is a little lower than the proportion of foreigners in the country's population: About 10 percent of Austria's 8.2 million residents are citizens of another country. The majority hail from the former Yugoslavia and Turkey. (Often they are former "guest workers" or their descendants; Austria recruited workers from those regions in the 1960s and '70s.)
Perhaps because it is so difficult to settle in Austria as an immigrant, the country has attracted a lot of asylum seekers. To be sure, many of the petitioners legitimately faced persecution in their home country because of their race, religion, nationality, social group, or political opinion (the criterion they have to meet in order qualify as asylees). But the fact that outsiders are pretty much barred from entering Austria unless they are highly skilled workers or are related to someone already in the country creates incentives to embellish. Right now, Austria has a backlog of more than 30,000 asylum applications. When their stories fail to convince, authorities are strict about sending people packing, as the Zogaj case illustrates.
The policies may look unduly strict, even callous. But the fact that the government is tough on outsiders helps maintain support for a very generous social safety net. Austrians have access to free medical care, virtually free secondary education, and four months' paid parental leave for each child. Those benefits are expensive, and, fairly or not, when recipients share an ethnic and cultural background, citizens are less likely to complain that their high taxes are bankrolling freeloaders.
Of course, sometimes countries open the door to immigrants in part to fund expensive public programs. An influx of foreigners can help even out the ratio of workers to retirees, which can reduce pressure to raise taxes or cut programs. But Austria hasn't been under so much pressure to allow in more potential taxpayers, in part because a lot of Austrians who would have collected benefits died during World War II.
That period of Austria's history—or, more precisely, how Austrians interpret it—affects the country's approach to outsiders in a less tangible way. From 1938 to 1945, the country was part of the Third Reich. Hitler received a hero's welcome when he marched triumphantly into Vienna, and many residents embraced his virulent anti-Semitism. Hitler was born in Austria, and compatriots from the land of his birth—such as Amon Göth (who was portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List)—enthusiastically participated in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, in 1943, the Allies' so-called Moscow Declaration described Austria as "the first free country to fall victim to Hitlerite aggression." That wording was intended, in part, to assure Austrians they would be treated fairly after the war and to discourage them from holding out until the bitter end. Austrians seized on the "first victim" appellation after the war; successive governments avoided fully acknowledging the country's Nazi past or compensating Austria's Jewish victims.
In other countries, a sense of history has pushed governments to be more open to outsiders. For example, German politicians are, for the most part, careful to avoid publicly excoriating immigrants. Without Austria's collective amnesia, the aggressive pursuit of unsuccessful asylum seekers might engender a sense of déjà vu. A more forthright appraisal of the recent past might also have checked the rise of right-wing politician Jörg Haider, who died in a car crash this weekend. In Germany, far-right leaders have not gained much traction, no doubt in part because German voters know all too well where that ideology can lead. Haider's "Austria First!" slogan, in contrast, garnered enough support in the 1999 election to allow his party to join the ruling coalition government. Appalled EU member states slapped sanctions on Austria, which were lifted seven months later, in part because the rebuke was hardening pro-Haider sentiment. Elections held last month showed that Haider still found favor among many Austrian voters: The two far right parties captured 29 percent of the vote.
That outcome was chalked up in part to the parties' strong anti-foreigner platform, a position that is becoming a vote-winner across the continent. In April 2008, Silvio Berlusconi reclaimed the prime ministership of Italy in part by advocating a crackdown on foreigners, and last year, anti-immigrant politicians scored victories in Switzerland and Denmark. Britain's Conservative Party has also found that pushing for curbs on immigration scores high in opinion polls. Austria isn't a cutting-edge place—you can still find royalists in Vienna, for example. But when it comes to dealing with immigrants, the Austrian blueprint may not be an outlier in Europe for much longer.
