Sunday, Nov. 13, 2005

Outside Looking In

By JOHANNA McGEARY

Adnan, Reda and Iachim could be brothers: young, struggling, second-generation Europeans with a grievance. The wiry, kinetic Adnan, 22, owns his own mobile-phone shop, but he's still subjected to regular stop-and-search by the local cops, just like most young men in his neighborhood. When he takes his sharp Mini Cooper for a drive, he says, "The police stop me three times a month, asking, 'Where did you get the money to buy that car?'" Reda, a short, dark-haired 21-year-old, is about to finish vocational school and hopes to find a job in electronics, but says, "When I walk down the street, people say 'blackhead' just because I've got black hair. Whenever a job requires contact with the customer, the management never takes a blackhead." At 26, Iachim is articulate, intelligent and very frustrated. Despite a diploma in retail management, he's prepared to do any kind of work, "even if it's cleaning floors." But for six months, he's been rejected for every job he has applied for. "I never thought it would be this hard," he says, "and it makes me very angry. I feel the system is not giving me a break." Adnan is British, of Pakistani descent; Reda is a German of Palestinian origin; and Iachim is Dutch, with Moroccan parents. Like the angry young men who rampaged through France for over two weeks, they are part of Europe's embittered underclass.

France is not the only country where the ideals of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité have failed whole generations. Nor is it the only nation struggling to come up with the right ways to blend people of different colors, creeds and cultures into once homogenous societies. Integration is still very much a work in progress. With debris from the riots still smoldering, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin acknowledged just that: "France is wounded. It cannot recognize itself in its streets. The effectiveness of our model of integration is in question." Across the rest of the Continent, Europeans are asking whether the pent-up frustration of ethnic minorities might erupt elsewhere. Here's a look at what's working — and what's not.

BRITANNIA'S RULES
Khaddam Hussain arrived in the northern English city of Bradford at the age of 8. His parents, like many Pakistanis in the early 1960s, had come to fill their former colonial rulers' demand for cheap labor. While his father kept his head down working at the woolen mill, Khaddam coped with racism. "I was the only Asian in the whole school," he says. "Day in and day out I got beaten up and some teachers just stood there." Soon, though, there were few white faces left in the Manningham district, where his family lived. Asians moved into the terraced houses and eventually, Pakistani supermarkets banned alcohol. Children learned little English and not much else at ill-funded schools that were almost 95% Asian. As they grew older, young men complained of police insensitivity and borderline brutality. Some, like Khaddam's son Adnan, had enough resourcefulness and family help to start their own businesses, but many can't find a way out of the ghetto.

The eruption came when a minor clash between white and Asian gangs exploded into three days of violence in July 2001. Young Asian men turned their rage on the police and ravaged the symbols of "white culture," like a BMW showroom and a club for white working-class men. Many of the older generation were shocked their sons were involved. But young men with Bradford rather than Punjabi accents were no longer operating by their fathers' rules. "They feel a distance from their own parents," says Martin Baines, a West Yorkshire police inspector who has worked on police–community relations for 25 years. "They've created a culture and identity all their own."

The riots coincided with the publication of a report on ways to ease cross-cultural tensions. The report painted a grim portrait of a place where white flight had left behind an underclass of poor ethnic minorities and concluded that the nation was in danger of becoming a collection of separate communities leading parallel lives with their own places of worship, employment, schools, community organizations, languages and social networks.

Bradford exemplified the perils of Britain's 20-year approach to integrating its immigrants. Responding to the open racism that greeted the first postwar wave from the old empire, Britain grudgingly decided to let the different identities of its minorities flourish. Yet for more than a decade — and especially after the July attacks on London's transport system by alleged homegrown suicide bombers — the government has grown increasingly uneasy with passive multiculturalism. Trevor Phillips, the black chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, recently fueled the debate when he charged Britain with "sleepwalking into segregation," with its emphasis on recognizing and respecting diverse cultures.

But Britain rejects U.S.-style affirmative action in favor of something less drastic: having the government take a more active interest in ensuring all its diverse citizens share enough values and common experiences to keep the country together. That can entail small things like encouraging a more profound sense of British citizenship through tests of national knowledge. And it can involve wholesale changes in how the police, for example, interact with minority communities. In Bradford, Baines works for a department that now has 4.1% minority police officers, regularly consults with an ethnic-liaison committee, broadcasts a radio program to the Asian audience, and works with locals to head off trouble before it can build into rioting. The difference in community policing, he says, is that "We're on the ground, we can't run and hide."

Yet the steps are incremental. Bradford today is still a poor, uneasy mix of integration and discrimination. Iftikhar Hussain, manager of a restaurant wrecked by white youths in revenge for the 2001 riots, has helped rebuild a business that attracts a booming white clientele. But he is convinced racism lies behind difficulties he's had with the local authorities. And he is angry that the schools his children attend are still almost completely Asian. He supplements their lessons with private tutors and the kids, aged 18, 16 and 14, want to go to university. "But I worry because they haven't been to school with any whites," says Hussain. "How are they going to handle things when they go to university with them or when they start a job?"

DUTCH NEGLECT
Iachim Hicham considers himself as Dutch as any blond. His family, originally from Morocco, arrived in the Netherlands 35 years ago, and he has lived all his life in the West Amsterdam neighborhood of De Baarsjes. "This is my home. I'm an Amsterdammer," he says. "But I'm not treated like one." In the six months he has been looking for work, he has seen his Dutch friends, even those with less education, easily find jobs. But he says his Moroccan coloring and accent are an impediment. "My friend Arthur switches jobs two or three times a year," says Hicham.

The streets of De Baarsjes, just past the outer ring of Amsterdam's city center, look tidy, but misery hides in the long brick terraces. They are home to increasing numbers of resentful males of immigrant origin, mainly Moroccan but also Turkish and Surinamese. De Baarsjes has one of the largest concentration of minorities, and among the highest crime, unemployment and truancy rates in the city.

For years, the Dutch government welcomed immigrants and provided them with housing and welfare benefits. It let them assimilate or not, as they liked, and for a while, it worked. Despite their reputation for tolerance, the Dutch allowed a growing chasm to develop between whites and ethnic minorities that turned neighborhoods like De Baarsjes into separate and unequal enclaves. The school system provides state money to parents who want to set up their own schools around particular beliefs, encouraging educational — and religious — segregation. And tolerance often masked indifference to whether minorities succeeded. Today, some 1.7 million non-Western immigrants and their children make up 10% of the Dutch population. More than half are Muslims who brought with them a traditionalist culture that fits uneasily in freewheeling, secular Holland.

The façade of peaceful multiculturalism was shattered in 2002 by the rise to political prominence of Pim Fortuyn, who wanted to close the door to new immigrants, and then by his assassination in the same year. The ugly rifts in society were again laid bare two years later when a Dutch Moroccan murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh, claiming he had "insulted Allah." In the aftermath the country made a sharp political turn. The current government has adopted citizenship exams and compulsory Dutch courses. It has also enacted one of the toughest political asylum laws in Europe.

However discouraging such laws might feel to Dutch immigrants, sociologist Godfried Engbersen says "the situation in our suburbs has not yet deteriorated as badly as in France." Even problematic areas like De Baarsjes remain comparatively better integrated than the banlieue. Authorities make a point of building well-to-do housing near poor neighborhoods to stem white flight. But a stagnant economy and cutbacks in generous welfare benefits mean fewer jobs for the poorest — like Hicham. Hatim Benjelloun, a counseler at La Rainbow youth center in De Baarsjes, says damage has already been done. The guys who come in, he says, see no future for themselves in Dutch society, "even though they're just as Dutch as Klaas or Jan."

THE GERMAN WAY
May Day celebrations in Kreuzberg, a district of Berlin known for its high density of Turkish immigrants, used to break down in open brawls between kids and police. But this year, Reda Hussein, whose parents are Palestinian, and his friends worked with police to keep the crowds in order. "This is our home," says the muscular young man in the thick accent of a native Berliner. "It's really lousy when the neighborhood you live in gets torn apart. People are frustrated. But projects like this give us hope and I think that makes things different here than in Paris."

In the streets of Kreuzberg and Neukölln, one of Berlin's toughest immigrant areas, there don't seem to be many angry young men wandering around. In these largely Turkish neighborhoods, the young are more focused on finding opportunities to improve their lives. And, after decades of neglecting the guest workers who were supposedly going home one day, Germany is beginning to help them. It was a long time coming, admits Marieluise Beck, the Federal Commissioner for Migration, Refugees and Integration: "Germany overslept by 30 years." But in 2000 the government agreed to grant citizenship to German-born children of immigrant workers. Now more immigrants are entering the professions and taking part in politics: 15 Turks or Kurds sit in various levels of the German government.

A key reason for Germany's relative success may simply be that its main minority is Turkish — one-third of the country's estimated 8 million immigrant community. Kemal Sahin, the president of the Association of Turkish Businessmen and Industrialists in Europe, says Germany's Turkish community runs 65,000 businesses, employing some 323,000 people. "Creating jobs is the very best way to avoid here what has happened in France," he says. The community's entrepreneurial culture is evident in the Turkish-language edition of the Berlin yellow pages, packed with glossy ads for Turkish businesses.

Yet there is still disadvantage. If any neighborhood was ever going to blow, it would be Neukölln. About half the population of Neukölln North and one-third of total residents are immigrants and their descendents. Unemployment reaches 25%, twice the national average, and climbs to 45% among the young. But Mayor Heinz Buschkowsky says residents are cushioned by Germany's expansive dole. A single unemployed man, he says, gets €800 a month, and families can receive a total of €2,000 a month in state payments. "We pay for our social peace," says Buschkowsky.

Germans have also come to accept that integration doesn't just happen. Under a law enacted on Jan. 1, the government is funding a raft of programs to nudge it along. One pays for "District Mothers," a program to visit immigrant women afraid to venture into the larger community; another, called Quartiersmanagement, includes résumé training and homework tutorials.

But Germany should be careful not to be complacent, says Cem Ozdemir, the first ethnic Turk to win national office and now a member of the European Parliament. The country's educational system still shuts out immigrant children. "If you don't give the young access to the best schools," he warns, "you will lose contact with these people." More young men in Neukölln, says Buschkowsky, are turning to "religiosity" and a fundamentalist lifestyle. Tackling discrimination in education and employment will help, he says, but "we must get our values into their heads."

That may be the ultimate solution. Western European nations will continue to construct different models for integrating restive minorities. Yet success requires addressing the same basic questions: What core values can be demanded from every citizen? Which areas of difference should be maintained and respected? How to ensure that economic and political disparities are narrowed? And how to make people feel part of a shared community? Difficult as the answers may be, France serves as a warning that all of Europe needs to find them.