Amsterdam
The Netherlands is granting amnesty to some 30,000 illegal immigrants. Anyone who applied for and failed to get asylum before 2001 will now get a permanent residence permit. The amnesty, enacted by a new legislature voted into office last fall, is a reversal of the previous government’s stridently anti-immigrant policy. Most immigrants to the Netherlands are Muslim, and immigration has been a hot issue because of the murders of two campaigners against Islamic extremism, politician Pim Fortuyn and filmmaker Theo van Gogh. But when the previous immigration minister ordered the deportation of thousands of asylum seekers, including children, most Dutch believed that was going too far.
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