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It just doesnt feel like Holland anymore...

From Canada's 'Globe and Mail':

Quote:

"The entire society is changing and people are longing for the world of 20, 30 years ago -- some people believe they can only find that by leaving," says Frans Buysse, a former Canadian embassy employee who runs Holland's largest agency for people wishing to emigrate to Canada.

Mr. Buysse can pinpoint the precise moment when the Dutch outflow became a full-scale flood. On Nov. 2, the libertine filmmakerTheo van Gogh was murdered in a bloody throat slitting by a Muslim extremist while cycling on an Amsterdam street. To outsiders, it seemed a strange, passing crime. But the Dutch responded, within their tight-knit community, the way some Americans did to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"Canadians are all immigrants," Mr. Rijniersce said from the austere living room of their flat in a funky corner of Rotterdam. "One or two generations back, they all emigrated from somewhere else. But here in the Netherlands there has been quite a lot of problems with this question -- integration doesn't work so well. In Canada it's worked better, though I don't know why. There's a little bit more tolerance between people than there is here."

For Mr. van Ramshorst, the small-town electrician, the problem is simply that Holland has let too many people in without any attention to their ability to fit into Dutch society.

"The last 10 years, our government's policy was to tolerate almost everything, and that's not good," he said. "There's law, and there's respect of the law, and you can't just let people do anything. Tolerance is very important, but we've reached the point where we're tolerating people who despise our way of life and want to damage it."

In a post I noted earlier this week, it was said that the strategy of the EU was 'rather than fix the leaks in the boat, to simply make the boat bigger'. But what happens when the crew leaves the boat?

So, what Holland without the Dutch? and expanding on that theme, whats Europe without Europeans?

( and whats Canada and America with Dutch, French, Walloons, Germans, Poles, Italians, Nigerians? Same as it ever was, Canada and America.

Posted @ April 23, 2005 10:52 AM | Current Affairs

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