Tolerance tested in Holland

First of three parts

AMSTERDAM - Parliamentarian Geert Wilders sees himself as the legendary Dutch boy, finger in the dike, holding back a rising tide of immigrants that threatens to swamp the Netherlands and all of Europe.

“Immigration is the biggest problem that Dutch society is facing today,” said Mr. Wilders, in his office in The Hague.

“We have been so tolerant of others’ culture and religion, we are losing our own. … Europe is losing itself. … One day we will wake up, and it will be too late. [Immigration] will have killed our country and our democracy.”

The intense politician spoke under the watchful eye of bodyguards, as his picture has been posted on Muslim Web sites calling for his beheading.

Mr. Wilders’ passion reflects a problem confronting much of Europe.

Old, cold and settled in its ways, the Continent struggles to absorb waves of immigrants, to protect itself from the growing hatred of Muslim militants in their midst and to live with the dark fear of a world spinning out of control.

“If Europe does not take the full and effective integration of its immigrants to heart and change its message from ‘You are not welcome. You don’t belong,’ to ‘We are in this together,’ Europe is going to have a very hard time,” said Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.

Said Mr. Wilders: “In the last 30 years, the Netherlands population has grown from 13 million to 16 million, about 25 percent, but the immigrant population has grown from 160,000 to 1.6 million — 1,000 percent. Ninety percent of our prison population is immigrants.”

“[Immigrants] are the most dependent on our [welfare] schemes. They are non-Westerners and not speaking our language,” he said.

“In the next [few] years, 75 percent of our population growth will be non-Western immigrants; only 8 percent will be native Dutch. This is fact, not opinion,” he said, dismissing a somewhat different picture that emerges from official statistics posted on government Web sites.

For example, Netherlands’ Central Statistical Office shows that about 50 percent, not 90 percent, of the prison population is foreign.

And Mr. Wilders’ 1.6 million figure can only be reached by including second- and third-generation children of immigrants, who were born in Holland and are citizens — individuals who would never be considered foreign in the United States.

Nevertheless, the thrust of his argument is gospel for Dutch immigration reformers.

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