Europeans are becoming more negative about immigrants

Europeans becoming disillusioned with multiculturalism:

Europeans are becoming more intolerant of immigrants and one in five want them sent home, a study released Tuesday by the European Union racism watchdog showed.

The study, based on pan-EU opinion surveys between 1997 and 2003, found a significant increase in support for the view that there were limits to a so-called multicultural society.

There was also a significant increase in the minority of people who supported repatriating immigrants, to 20 percent, the study said, without providing the scale of either increase.

"The European Union is confronted with intolerance and discriminatory attitudes toward minorities and migrants," Beate Winkler, head of the Vienna-based European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), told a news conference.

The center's analysis of the data found:

— 60 percent in the former EU of 15 states and 42 percent in the 10 mainly east European states that joined the EU last year believed there were "limits to multicultural society."

— nearly 40 percent across the EU opposed granting legal immigrants full civil rights.

— 50 percent expressed "resistance to immigrants."

— 58 percent saw a "collective ethnic threat" from immigration, meaning they answered yes to questions including whether immigrants threaten jobs and a country's culture, add to crime problems and make a country a worse place to live.

The study said the largest increases across the six years of polling were in support for sending immigrants home and the view that there were limits to a multicultural society.

"They are the two most significant trends," chief researcher John Wrench told a news conference.

With the destructive activities of immigrants in Spain and the Netherlands who could blame the Europeans for being increasingly skeptical of immigrants?