Immigrants Need Not Apply

With its brown cafes and red lights and a population as varied as its famous rijsttafel banquets, the Netherlands has long symbolized liberal values. And so recent initiatives promoted by Rita Verdonk, Minister for Integration and Immigration, have come as a shock, even as they tap into the country's anxieties over its immigrant population. In late January she proposed that everyone in the country should speak Dutch in public life, although it wasn't clear how that could be enforced. Then she decided to tackle the issue at its root: she took off for Kenya, where she urged refugees from war-torn Somalia not to apply for asylum in the Netherlands.

All of this is on top of tough new rules: would-be residents have to take an exam about Dutch culture and institutions. Inviting a non-European spouse to settle in the Netherlands is so fraught with bureaucracy that some Dutch who fall for foreigners follow their hearts and move abroad.

The government's strict policies have already achieved dizzying drops in the numbers of refugees moving to Holland. According to the National Bureau for Statistics, there has been a decline of almost 80% in asylum applications since a peak in 2000, and the country — once among the most popular destinations for refugees in the European Union — now holds 10th place, below even Cyprus. Overall immigration is also down, contributing toward the country's lowest population growth since the 1920s.

Yet Verdonk says immigration must be further curtailed to enable the second element in her portfolio — integration — to succeed. She's in tune with the mood music in Holland first orchestrated by assassinated politician Pim Fortuyn and played by supporters of her center-right coalition government. She came second in an online election for person of the year by the left-leaning De Volkskrant newspaper.

But the Dutch left is horrified. After a fire in a detention center for failed asylum seekers killed 11, left-wing activists, including some elected officials, displayed banners denouncing Verdonk as a murderer. "This climate of polarization is especially worrisome because it obscures a decent debate on the issues," says Eduard Nazarski, director of Vluchtelingenwerk Nederland, a nongovernmental organization assisting refugees. But as long as Verdonk remains popular, symbolic measures may continue to trump debate.