Corporate Netherlands mounts anti-immigrant witch-hunt
By Steve James
12 August 2002


Representatives of Dutch business have been emboldened by the
anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Netherlands’ political parties to mount
their own racist witch-hunt to divert blame for deepening social and
economic problems onto the most oppressed layers.

According to Het Financieele Dagblaad, Jaap Blokker announced in the
annual report of Blokker Holdings that the “entire asylum and illegal
immigrants industry” were responsible for most of the armed robbery in
the Netherlands. Shop work, claimed Blokker, meant having “a good
chance of having a pistol pushed into your face or a knife held to
your throat” and most robberies were carried out by Antilleans,
Moroccans or East Europeans, encouraged by politically correct and
over indulgent politicians. Blokker is co-owner of the Blokker
Holdings retail empire, which controls 2,400 high street shops
including Intertoys, Xenos, Bart Smith, Leen Baaker, Casa and
Marskamer.

Blokker’s comments were endorsed by MKB Nederland, an employers’
federation and political lobby group that claims to represent some
125,000 small and medium sized businesses in the Netherlands.
According to the Guardian, MKB Nederland agreed with Blokker that
immigrants were committing too much crime and the government should
impose longer prison sentences on those caught shoplifting. MKB
Nederland claimed that the problem was particularly acute in
Rotterdam, which has a high concentration of immigrants and where the
far right Lisjt Pim Fortuyn (LPF) first came to prominence early this
year, when it won a dominant position on the city council. An unnamed
police source told the Guardian that ninety percent of street crime in
Rotterdam was committed by immigrants, but said this was not
surprising since almost half of the city’s population was of “foreign
extraction.”

Simultaneous with Blokker’s and MKB Nederland’s remarks, according to
Het Parool, Dutch TNC Royal Philips Electronics announced that it was
no longer going to offer work to unemployed migrant workers in the
Netherlands on account of their inability to speak Dutch. Philips, one
of the world’s leading consumer electronics companies operates in 60
countries, few of whose first language is Dutch. The company has been
savaging its own workforce, after suffering its largest ever losses in
2001. 12,000 of the company’s 188,600 workers have been informed they
will be sacked.

Besides Philips, other leading Dutch companies and financial
institutions are in trouble and intensified hounding of immigrants is
a predictable device for diverting attention from the stringent
economic measures intended to reduce state welfare spending and defend
profit margins. The Amsterdam stock exchange has been volatile, with
financial giant Aegon reporting profits down 77 percent and leading
bank ABN Amro recording a 60 percent fall for the first two quarters
of 2002. According to the Central Planning Bureau, unemployment is
expected to rise to 385,000, while the state budget deficit is
expected to be four times greater than anticipated. Economic growth
expectations have been reduced from 2.25 percent to 1.5 percent,
triggering calls for deeper cuts in social spending than those already
planned by the incoming government.

Anti-immigrant rhetoric dominated the general election and reached an
unprecedented pitch after the assassination of Pim Fortuyn. Fortuyn’s
oft-repeated election slogan was that “the boat is full”. This stance
was shared by all the major parties, all of which hoped to stampede
the population into accepting a wide range of anti-democratic measures
on the pretext that a clampdown on immigrants would ameliorate the
decay of social conditions. Taking up where the preceding “Purple
Coalition” led by the Dutch Labour Party (PvDA) left off, the new
LPF/Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA)/Liberal (VVD) government has
announced border patrols and increased policing to track down and
deport asylum seekers and “illegal” immigrants. Whole regions will be
designated danger areas, with police authorised to conduct stop and
search sweeps for illegal migrants.

The Netherlands remains a wealthy country, with an economy that in
2000 was the 15th largest in the world, bigger than that of the entire
Russian Federation. Its 16.2 million population is only slowly
increasing. According to the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS),
in 2001 a mere 27,000 people successfully sought asylum in the
Netherlands. Increasing numbers of those came from the former Soviet
Union, Angola, Sierra Leone, and the Sudan, while claims from Iran,
Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq declined. This already rather small
number is falling, due to an Aliens Act introduced by the Kok
government. According to the ANP news agency, one third of all asylum
claims are now immediately rejected, while the rights of asylum
seekers to appeal a rejection of their claim have been curtailed.

The PvDA’s clampdown on asylum rights has inevitably led to increasing
numbers of migrants with no legal status whatsoever. In these
conditions a rise in petty crime reflects the state of desperation to
which sections of the population have been reduced. Even here, though,
the numbers are small. It is estimated that between 46,000 and 110,000
people, fleeing from poverty, war and social disaster, entered the
Netherlands unofficially in 2001. A report from Rotterdam’s Erasmus
University noted that thousands of rejected asylum seekers exist
entirely on charity handouts from social and religious organisations.
The report warned that if these groups ended their support, then
thousands of people would be forced onto the streets. In The Hague
alone, 25 organisations are devoted to supporting rejected asylum
seekers, while 40 percent of local municipalities provide no support
whatsoever. In April, the city hall in the Hague was occupied by 20
rejected asylum seekers who had been evicted by the Hague council from
their temporary accommodation. For its part, shortly before its
collapse the PvDA government commissioned research from the Catholic
University of Brabant into methods of deporting failed asylum seekers
to their country of origin.

Migrant workers who manage to retain legal status form some of the
most oppressed sections of the working population. Infant mortality
amongst non-Western migrants is 30 percent higher than the rest of the
Dutch population, a statistic attributed to stress and poverty. Child
mortality to teenage migrant mothers is 60 percent above the average.
A report from the Verwey Jonker Institute reported that twice as many
Turkish workers, and one and a half times as many Moroccans were
“completely job disabled” and dependent on the job disability scheme
(WAO). The report cited “stress of the migrants’ existence”,
“persistently lower educational level” and physically more dangerous
work as explanation for the statistics. In all 920,000 people were
registered on the disability scheme, 20 percent of whom were migrants.
The new government aims to reduce those eligible for the WAO by 40
percent.

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