February 19, 2004

Dutch to expel thousands of asylum seekers

The Dutch government was in no mood to back down yesterday after pushing through legislation that provides for the mass expulsion of more than 20,000 failed asylum seekers.
    The governing center-right coalition has blocked all moves to soften the bill, passed Tuesday in the face of outraged howls from church and human rights groups.
    Under the law, the first of its kind in Europe, children reared in the Netherlands and settled refugees with stable jobs will be uprooted and deported as the government attempts to clear a years-old asylum backlog in one "clean sweep."
    About 26,000 rejected asylum seekers who arrived in the Netherlands before April 1, 2001, and have exhausted all appeals will be stripped of their asylum benefits and put on aircraft to go back home.

These include Afghans, Somalis and Chechens[Basically Islamist societies all. Isn't that an interesting coincidenc?--Jen] facing civil wars or life in regions with no functioning government.
    The Christian Democrat-led government has granted an amnesty for 2,300 asylum seekers considered to face the gravest risks if they return home. The Labor Party opposition had demanded amnesty for 8,000.
    Human Rights Watch accused the country of failing to consider "evidence of integration" into Dutch society and of violating the international Convention on the Rights of the Child.
[Contrary to what HRW says, these immigrants have not integrated into Dutch society for the most part and show no sign of doing so in the future.--J.T.]

 The Dutch Council of State ruled two years ago that the convention does not apply to children of immigrants who have no right to residence in the Netherlands, a move widely branded a "dangerous precedent."
[I think that we here in the USA are more than familiar with this phenomenon!]
    Although the mass deportation has horrified the moderate-left enclaves of Amsterdam and Utrecht, it has been well received in working-class areas most threatened by rising unemployment.
    The law goes beyond the rhetoric of conservative politician Pim Fortuyn, who argued before his assassination two years ago that foreigners already living in the country should be allowed to stay.

Critics said the law would prove unenforceable because international rules prevent states from deporting refugees who have no documents, or who lie about their origin.
[Contrary to the beliefs of the Left, the world has no "international rules." Compliance with any global conventions or treaties is totally at the whim and the good will to cooperate of the offending party the world body in question goes after, viz. the ICJ and Israel over their fence.]
    The Justice Ministry conceded that many would have to be let loose on Dutch streets if they refused to accept a free flight home and a repatriation cash bonus after a two-month stint in a deportation center.
[Oh, brother. This is still going to cost the Dutch plenty!--Jen]
    "They will become illegal immigrants without any right to benefits. There is nothing else we can do," said a spokesman, acknowledging that they could be drawn into the criminal underworld.
[...]

Nearly 19 percent of the Dutch population of 16 million is of foreign stock, with sizable contributions from Turkey (340,000), Suriname[former Dutch Guiana] (320,000) and Morocco (295,000), according to Agence France-Presse.

New asylum applications have fallen steeply from 43,560 in 2000 to an estimated 10,000 in the past year, but the scale of past immigration -- mostly through family reunion -- has stirred fears that Dutch society is spiraling out of control.
    A parliamentary report last month concluded that the country's 30-year experiment in tolerant multiculturalism had been a failure, and has resulted in poor schools, violence, and ethnic ghettoes that shun intermarriage with the Dutch.

It found that 70 percent to 80 percent of third-generation Dutch-born immigrants imported their spouses from their "home" countries, mostly Turkey and Morocco.
The consequences of this were brought home after September 11, 2001, when the intelligence service discovered that terror network al Qaeda was "stealthily taking root in Dutch society."
    Immigrants make up almost 50 percent of the population of Rotterdam. Once a Labor stronghold, the city became the launching pad for Mr. Fortuyn's mass movement, which drew from the left as well as the right, warning that radical Islam posed a threat to the Netherlands' easygoing liberal values.

How do you say "Bravo" (or more correctly "Bravi") in Dutch?
This is a very courageous move on the part of the Dutch government and one that we can only hope will be imitated by the other European countries (except, of course, France, where they busy themselves futzing over Muslim headscarves).
I'm sure that the Dutch don't like to think of themselves as cruel, intolerant or mean, but they're doing what they have to do to save their country and their culture.
Just as we here are now facing doing something about America's illegal immigrants.
There's just no getting around the cold, hard fact that the entire world changed drastically on 9/11/01 and what we would put up with before that dark day is acceptable no longer.
Hard times demand hard choices.
The immigration problem is rather worse in Europe because they have millions of these Muslim immigrants from the failed societies of the Middle East, Africa and Asia and of course, they aren't separated by an ocean from most of them, but are attainable by land travel.
(Although I once was on an almost empty KLM flight from Cairo to Amsterdam that stopped in Turkey on the way and filled up with migrant workers going to work in Holland.)
These Muslim immigrants don't integrate, don't learn Dutch or embrace much else of Dutch culture.
Many live on "welfare" and don't work, because the multiculti socialist Nanny State they embraced for decades was set up that way.
The Netherlands is facing the same depressing demographics that the rest of Europe is: the average age of a large bloc of their citizens is approaching retirement, the cost of their many benefits like nationalized medicine is rising, while tax revenue from the younger working population is declining.
I'm proud of the Dutch for realizing that the situation wasn't getting any better and was probably going to get worse, so they're doing the right, painful thing to rectify the situation.
As for their contribution to America, they're not only vital participants in our Allied Coalition, but if this immigration reform is actually carried out, Holland will be one less place in Europe and the world where radical Islamists can stir up jihad, radicalize Muslim moderates, plot and plan terror attacks and set up IslamoNazi sleeper cells.