Changing attitudes towards immigration in Britain and Europe

Europeans are finally waking up to the problems of immigration:

Two recent polls here took political watchers by surprise. The first showed that the Conservatives, despite a lacklustre leader, trail Tony Blair's Labour by only a couple of percentage points.

The second showed that the political topic that most concerns Britons — 24 per cent of them — is one that, unlike health or education or taxes, affects very few of them directly. That topic is immigration.

Blair and Labour are still highly likely to win the election that's virtually certain to be called for early May. The economy, which at all times is the wedge issue that flattens all others in almost every industrial democracy, is in great shape.

The poll on immigration, though, revealed a shift in the public's mood that may have long-term significance. What seems to have happened is that a change in pan-European attitudes toward newcomers has crossed the channel.

Terrorism is a factor, of course. So is concern about possible waves of newcomers from the new member-states of the European Union in Eastern and Central Europe. So, more long term, is Turkey's probable entry into the EU.

It's an identity crisis, magnified by the belated realization that no matter how few newcomers may come in from now on, the combination of a high birth-rate among those already resident and of an aging "native-born" population that no longer produces enough babies to reproduce itself, is going to profoundly change Europe's culture and character and look.

This realization has happened most quickly and most radically to Europe's most laid-back people, the Dutch. In everything from sex to pot-smoking to multiculturalism (generous state funding for mosques and religious schools), Holland has long been Europe's most liberal nation.

This winter, a well-known filmmaker, Theo Van Gogh, was murdered, with brutal deliberation, by a Muslim fanatic. Right afterwards, several mosques and religious schools were firebombed (as were some Christian churches).

The response that mattered was the ideological one. Suddenly, liberalism has fallen almost entirely out of fashion. The once unsayable thought, indeed the unthinkable — that Holland has too many non-Dutch to remain Dutch — is now said almost every day.

The government is hurrying to implement new immigration rules. The press points out that in a few years, the non-Dutch (overwhelmingly Muslim) will be in the majority among those younger than age 20 in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague. And there's been a sharp increase in the number of Dutch seeking to emigrate.

The change in Holland is the most dramatic, but it's part of a wider trend. In Belgium, the far right, anti-immigrant Vlaams Belang party now commands the support of one-quarter of the electorate. In Germany, opposition leader Angela Merkell has said, "The idea of a multicultural society cannot survive."

But have Europeans come to this realization too late to do anything about it?