Europeans slam door on outsiders

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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.