Fabricius de Vreede cringed as he drove his black taxicab through one of this port town's toughest neighborhoods, past the knot of young black men standing on the street corner -- "dealing drugs," he confidently explained -- and past two teenagers of North African descent who appeared to be rolling a joint on a small bridge over a canal.
He rarely does this drive at night, into many of what the Dutch call Rotterdam's "no-go areas." When he does, he carries a heavy club, always within reach. "At night, you can't walk in Rotterdam anymore," said de Vreede, who is only 21 but speaks with an aged weariness. "The central station area is scary. Even I'm scared."
Like many Dutch people, he never says who he feels is responsible. But the political maverick Pim Fortuyn broke these taboos, openly pointing a finger at the country's large immigrant community. His assassination earlier this month helped make immigration the prime issue in today's national elections. Some projections show his party, with its platform of limiting new immigration, finishing second.
Immigrants and their descendants now make up about 10 percent of the population of the Netherlands, and more than a third in the country's biggest cities, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague.
In a country with an aging population, low birth rate and a need to fill jobs, immigration has long been an important component of the economy. From an early wave of low-paid Moroccan immigrants in the 1960s and '70s to fill manual labor jobs, to the more recent influx from Turkey and the Balkans, the Netherlands has traditionally absorbed outsiders with little public debate.
De Vreede is himself an example of this historical welcome: his father is Dutch and his mother came from Brazil.
At first glance, Rotterdam seems to be a model of successful multiculturalism. On the road outside the central train station, the Afro-Asian supermarket is near Hong Kong Travel. A-Pien's shop serves Surinamese-Chinese cuisine; barber shops specialize in African and Asian hair styles.
But at night, this and other immigrant neighborhoods take on a feel that is sinister to many whites. "The no-go areas that Pim Fortuyn was talking about really exist -- people don't go out of their houses at night," said Otto Groeneveld, 48, a landscaper. "For older people, girls, women, you can't walk there even in the daytime. They have guns. They take your mobile phone, your jewelry."
He added, "The gap between the politicians and the citizens is too big. They don't come to these no-go areas. They never come and ask people what's wrong. Most of the politicians live outside Rotterdam in nice houses. They don't see all the Moroccans around."
People see problems in newcomers from Eastern Europe as well. Some immigrants who fled the ethnic wars in the Balkans in the 1990s are involved in manufacturing chemical drugs like ecstasy, and trafficking in weapons and prostitutes, authorities said.
For their part, immigrants often say they are being singled out unfairly, and that Fortuyn succeeded mainly in pitting ethnic communities against each other. Since his death, many immigrants said, white Dutch citizens have lost their reticence to express views that would have been considered unacceptable before.
"If I have a colleague who doesn't like me, now I know it," said Fatiha Yousfi, 27, a Dutch-born woman of Moroccan descent who works at an export-import company in Amsterdam. "Before, if they were racist, they didn't want to talk about it."
In interviews, young Dutch Moroccan men said they are all now viewed as potential criminals.
Khalid Mahdaoui, 23, was born here, and said that while he feels Dutch, "the Dutch people treat me differently." When he enters a crowded streetcar, "the driver goes on the microphone and warns people to be aware of pickpockets," he said. He recalled learning when he was younger to keep his hands high on a tram's overhead bar, so people would not suspect him of reaching for their wallets.
Popular dance clubs are generally off-limits to people like him, he said. "If I go to a disco, they won't let me in," he said. "But if I dye my hair blond, and my eyebrows blond, I can get in."
Mahdaoui and his friend, Redouan Salmoun, 21, said they know some young Moroccans who have been involved in street crime, but they said it's a tiny number.
Despite a widespread perception that crime is snowballing, government statistics show that overall it remained fairly steady from the mid-1990s until 2000, the last year for which firm statistics are available. Only a few categories, such as vandalism, increased in that period.
Nationally, there is no breakdown of criminals by ethnic origin. But some cities keep their own statistics. Rotterdam, for example, reported that 49 percent of crimes and the vast majority of street crimes are committed by Moroccan immigrant youths.
Some analysts said those figures can be misleading. "In Rotterdam, 60 or 70 percent of the youngsters are immigrants, so it's not very surprising that 60 or 70 percent of the crimes are done by them," said Ila Kasim, 34, a businessman and member of Citizenship and Islam, a government advisory panel.
Also, experts said, crime statistics do not include offenses such as hooliganism at soccer games, an almost exclusively white phenomenon.
Ahmed Aboutaleb, a Moroccan immigrant who runs the Institute for Multicultural Development, a government-funded research group on cross-cultural issues, suggested that when young immigrants turn to crime it's partly because of Dutch society. "These kids were born here," he said. "Where did they learn how to be a thief? . . . These kids face exactly the same kinds of problems we know faced Dutch kids -- single-income parents, divorced parents, parents of bad socioeconomic condition."
But aspects of the immigrant experience can add more pressure, according to Aboutaleb and other experts. Traditional roles in which fathers are strong authority figures are reversed here, for instance. When the fathers speak little or no Dutch, the children help them navigate government bureaucracies and survive everyday life. As a result, the experts said, fathers' roles as authority figures in the home are often lost.
Immigrants face pervasive discrimination in employment, apartment rentals and other aspects of everyday life, said Frank Bovenkerk, a criminologist at the University of Utrecht. Although most Dutch, in opinion polls or samples, will not say they are racist, "in their actual behavior, it is racial discrimination that they practice," he said.
Often immigrants end up isolated from mainstream Dutch society. Rachida Azough, 27, a second-generation Dutch-Moroccan and a journalist with the left-of-center newspaper de Volkskrant, recalls growing up in a neighborhood that was "getting blacker and blacker."
She watched as white people moved out, creating what was an almost all-Moroccan environment in which Dutch was not spoken on the street and most people never learned the language well. Unemployment was high and schools were neglected. "It's only logical that a neighborhood consisting of only the lower socioeconomic classes, with an immigrant history, with problems in their own families, will have more problems," she said.
The Dutch way, she said, is "put them all together, then leave them behind."
Foreigners "don't integrate the way the Dutch would like them to integrate," said Bovenkerk. "They define their own situation here as temporary, even though they are never going 'home.' Therefore they feel it is not urgent to integrate. What it produces is this halfway generation."