Posted on 03/28/2004 10:47:51 AM PST by DeaconBenjamin
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, Lazizi faces imprisonment and expulsion to his 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. Last month, its Parliament adopted 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 about 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 couple who are handicapped and suffering dementia, and are cared for by their Dutch son and five grandchildren. Both are threatened with deportation to Syria, their home country.
"If I'm such a nuisance to the Dutch government, they should just kill me here," said Sarah Chmoun. "I don't need to be sent all the way back to Syria to die on the streets."
When she came in 1993, the doors were wide open for those seeking refuge from persecution -- 433,000, or 2.7 percent of the Dutch population, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
When her husband arrived 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, as did Lazizi and the Chmouns.
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 of 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," Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk said.
A gradual clampdown that began in 2000 has cut asylum applications by 70 percent, compared with declines of 36 percent in Germany, 38 percent in Britain and 60 percent in Belgium.
To discourage newcomers, the Dutch increased prices for residency documents by as much as 600 percent, cracked down on illegal labor, introduced compulsory language and citizenship courses, and made it much harder for an immigrant to import a spouse.
The parameters of the debate were transformed by the 2002 election campaign, when maverick politician Pim Fortuyn voiced an opinion many shared but were ashamed to say out loud: There's no room for more immigrants.
Fortuyn was assassinated nine days before the election, but his ideas resonated among Dutch who think the high taxes they pay for their social safety net shouldn't be spent on immigrants. Fortuyn's party won 10 percent of the vote and a place in a coalition government, where its ideas were co-opted by mainstream parties.
Thousands of refused asylum seekers already have been put on chartered flights, many to unstable countries such as Somalia and Afghanistan.
The new expulsion procedure will begin at closed-door centers at sites such as converted army barracks, each with room for several hundred inmates.
The government will be able to keep them there for up to four months, and they will be offered counseling and assistance in returning home.
Those refused travel documents by their home countries and therefore unable to return could be detained an additional six months and then put out on the street with no access to social services.
Stephan Kok, an international policy adviser at the Dutch Refugee Council, said the government is violating human rights conventions and going beyond social norms in the rest of the Europe.
The most troubling Dutch measure, Kok said, is the "accelerated procedure" that enables immigration officials to reject applications in 48 hours without even hearing an applicant's full story. The measure has created an "expulsion factory," he said.
Judges no longer can conduct their own examination of asylum applications and must accept the information provided by immigration officials. No other country is rejecting more than half its newcomers within four days and putting them on the street, Kok said.
Kok predicts it is just a matter of time before the Dutch state is hauled before the European Court of Human Rights, whose rulings are binding on European countries.
Like thousands of others who have exhausted Dutch asylum procedures, Lazizi has been asked to cooperate in his own unwilling departure by obtaining travel documents from the Algerian Embassy, but the embassy refused, he said.
Lazizi left Algeria in 1993 shortly after his Islamic Salvation Front party was outlawed and its leader assassinated. Under military rule, thousands of political opponents have been killed or gone missing and disappearances still occur, according to Human Rights Watch.
"The military came to power, and supporters of the party were oppressed or detained in prison camps in the desert," Lazizi, 31, said in an interview. "You have to stay silent and live under oppression. I couldn't do it."
He got a grant to study Dutch at Amsterdam University and graduated as a sports therapist. Although refused residency and a work permit, he illegally holds a full-time carpenter job and works as a sports therapist and judo teacher in the evenings.
"If you're caught with 3 kilograms of cocaine at the airport, you're free to walk because of prison cell shortages," Lazizi said. "But for us they build special expulsion centers."
yeah, but these "pikers" couldn't hold a candle to mexico...
If this handwringing parasitic traitor is correct and this court tells the Netherlands to stop protecting its soverignty, that will be a major decision point for the Dutch people. Obey the ruling and die as a nation.
or a pair
The Freeky-Deeky-Dutch are just figuring this out? What did they think their liberal immigrations laws were going to lead to? Utopia? Duh. . .
Unfortunately, the U.S. is going the same way - and it's all for political gain. It just p*sses me off SO MUCH!
Then the troublemakers get on the dole, so they are able to make trouble full-time.
Thanks for the post, Deacon.
Red alert. This operation, and its associated Armed Islamic Groups section, is a Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas/Al-Qaeda type of organization.
Let's see if I understand the editorial that the author of this article is weaving into his "news" story.
Being forcibly expelled now is unacceptable and inhumane, but had they been forcibly expelled when they were ordered to leave, it would have been more acceptable?
Who are the criminals here? If they are not "caught" they get an automatic pass?
Hello?
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