"Blind faith
August 27, 2005
Australia is watching keenly as Europe's great multicultural experiment seems to be unravelling.
....By 2000 60 per cent of Moroccan and Turkish men older than 40 in the Netherlands were jobless. In France, 40 per cent of young men of Algerian background are unemployed, four times the national rate.
Eran Bucak, 36, thinks the Netherlands is a 'fantastic country' and has risen to run a trucking company in west Amsterdam since he came from Turkey as a baby. But he sees second-generation migrants, especially Moroccans, battling unemployment, drugs and crime. He thinks the immigration experience is largely to blame.
"They came like lambs," he says of his father's generation. "They worked hard, they did their best, but they weren't educated. They didn't know how to teach their children Dutch language or Dutch ways. So they left the children on the street. The second generation, they get lost. They don't have work, they don't have anything."
Despite his success, Bucak can also feel lost between two worlds. To please his family he made an arranged marriage with a woman from Turkey. "I am grown up here, she is grown up there. It is not a good way to put people together.""
More:Blind faith - World - smh.com.au
