Zie ginds komt Apartheid

Published on 7 December 2024

Last Tuesday, MP Bente Becker (VVD) introduced a motion to address what she referred to as "integration problems" by establishing a population registry that will track the "norms and values," ethnicity, cultural background, and religion of Dutch citizens with migrant backgrounds. The motion was passed in parliament with a large majority.

In the Netherlands, we are dealing with a state apparatus that advocates for deliberate and policy-driven suspicion and segregation of non-native Dutch citizens through data collection and monitoring — with the aim of enabling further segregation down the line.

The motion’s self-proclaimed goal is to explain supposed deviations among non-native Dutch people in educational performance, socioeconomic status, and criminality through data collection on the basis of presumed divergent "norms and values," in order to "address societal issues in a precise manner."

The motion thus assumes that non-native Dutch people exhibit lower educational performance, below-average socioeconomic circumstances, and higher rates of criminality. However, research shows that differences in criminality between native and non-native Dutch people disappear once socioeconomic position is taken into account. According to Professor of Migration Leo Lucassen, the only factors that need to be named in explaining criminality are "social inequality and ethnic profiling" — the latter of which is unconstitutional but nonetheless practiced in the Netherlands.

When it comes to educational performance, research by the Netherlands Youth Institute shows that children with migrant backgrounds are the fastest-growing group entering pre-university secondary education. Participation in higher education among young people with migrant backgrounds has risen more sharply over the past twenty years than participation among native Dutch youth. The data therefore suggest that the integration of children and young people with migrant backgrounds is far from unsuccessful — quite the opposite. This, despite the deeply troubling findings of the documentary Klassen and the recently published report Anders Behandeld by the Children's Ombudsman, which show that children with migrant backgrounds experience structural racism and discrimination at school. The motion is simply not grounded in reality or facts when it comes to either criminality or education.

That leaves socioeconomic status, which is inextricably linked to access to the labor market — and, by extension, to education. Research by the University of Amsterdam (2023) shows that people with migrant backgrounds, and Muslim women wearing headscarves in particular, face structural discrimination. Moreover, ethnic discrimination in the labor market "has only increased in recent years." It is therefore hardly surprising that the socioeconomic position of people with migrant backgrounds lags behind that of native Dutch people. This is national policy.

Dutch citizens with migrant backgrounds — and particularly Dutch Muslims — are militantly associated by politicians with criminality and deviations from the norm, despite research that proves the opposite. The very existence of Muslim Dutch citizens is treated as an inherent violation of "Dutch norms and values," if we are to believe the political order’s definition of who we are as a society. It bares emphasizing that The Hague does not only define and implement policy — it plays a leading role in shaping public debate and setting the standard of socially acceptable conduct, and with that, our national identity. The Becker motion aims to display the inherent superiority of the native majority over the non-native minority.

As the state is ever more openly inciting racism and discrimination, the only possible outcome is less integration and more segregation. Article 1 of our Constitution is, first and foremost, intended to protect citizens from discrimination by the government. Yet the state — and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment in particular — is pursuing an increasingly far-reaching and institutionally elevated politics of apartheid.