Europeans slam door on outsiders

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — Mohammed Lazizi, who fled a bloody military crackdown in his native Algeria, seems a model candidate for political asylum.

After 11 years in the Netherlands, he speaks fluent Dutch, juggles three jobs, and teaches judo to handicapped children in his spare time.

Instead, Mr. Lazizi faces imprisonment and expulsion to his still-volatile and violent homeland.

The Netherlands, once one of Europe’s most open countries, is undergoing a fundamental shift that will turn away immigrants by the tens of thousands.

Virtually every European government is cracking down, but none as fiercely as the Dutch. Its parliament adopted in February a one-time measure to deport 26,000 rejected asylum seekers, and the government is preparing to open “expulsion centers” this spring where entire families will be detained pending deportation.

The first to go will be around 3,000 asylum seekers who have exhausted all possibilities.

No one, it seems, is immune — not even Sarah Chmoun, 79, and her husband, Chabo, 84, a Christian couple who are handicapped and suffering dementia, and are being cared for by their Dutch son and five grandchildren. Both are threatened with deportation back to Syria, their home country.

“If I’m such a nuisance to the Dutch government, they should just kill me here,” said Mrs. Chmoun. “I don’t need to be sent all the way back to Syria to die on the streets.”

When she came here in 1993, the doors were wide open for those seeking refuge from persecution. An estimated 433,000 people, equal to 2.7 percent of the Dutch population, applied for asylum between 1990 and 2003, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

When her husband joined her seven years later, the Dutch were having second thoughts.

Until now, rejected applicants were ordered to leave, but not forcibly expelled. So most stayed illegally, like Mr. Lazizi and Mr. and Mrs. Chmoun.

But increasingly, like many native Europeans, the Dutch feel overwhelmed by immigrants from the Muslim east, Africa and former Dutch colonies, who often form an underclass in crowded cities with high crime rates.

The Netherlands is one of the most densely packed countries on Earth. Its 3 million first- or second-generation immigrants are 19 percent of the 16 million inhabitants — nearly twice the proportion in neighboring Germany.

Cities such as Rotterdam are one-third immigrant, and studies say that figure will rise to 50 percent by 2017.

“An uncoordinated stream of immigrants leads to social tensions, overtaxing of the welfare state, disturbances in the labor market, and development of ‘concentration neighborhoods’ in the big cities,” said Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk.

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