Go Back to Where You Came From Read online

  Penninx even designed his own civic integration course in the 1990s and isn’t opposed to the principle—it’s the idea of making norms mandatory that riles him. “That’s not how it works,” he insists. If it doesn’t work for native Dutch alcoholics or prisoners, why should it work for immigrants? He is adamant that there is a way to signal to people which rules must be obeyed without stigmatizing them. “What I’m protesting against is that you make this kind of policy so specifically for immigrants” while ignoring natives who violate the same norms.

  Somalis know the norms about genital cutting, he insists. They have been in the country for twenty-five years now. And he thinks that there are more effective ways to prevent FGM than giving people integration courses. Public health institutions could take the lead. “They know what the problem is.… If you build it into the education of midwives, of people who are near to this, if you look at this as a health thing, then you’re in a much better position to change.”

  In the end, he believes, one must “bet on the good intentions of both sides, knowing that there will be clashes, at some point, and being prepared for those clashes.”42

  Scheffer agrees that those clashes are the country’s best hope for progress—but he has no time for cultural relativism. Diversity has become a buzzword, but it is “a completely empty word because it embraces everything and means nothing,” he argues. His dismissal is a critique of those who place equal value on all ideas and identities. People with extremist beliefs could be regarded as a form of diversity; so could illiterates. “Not everything that is different has a value,” he insists.

  Scheffer claims that teachers, doctors, and police are embarrassed to confront newcomers with basic Dutch norms. “In biology class, it’s become difficult to talk about evolution. It’s become difficult during literature class to talk about Oscar Wilde, because he is a ‘perverse’ writer. Now, if you’re going to scrap all the perverse writers from your curriculum, it will be a very short history of literature,” he quips. “During sexual education, students come with the books and all the illustrations the parents have torn from the book. During swimming class, it’s become very difficult to send children to mixed swimming class. So what do you do then?” he asks.

  What typically happens is schools strive to accommodate demands and avoid conflict. “I think we should do the opposite,” says Scheffer. It is confrontation, debate, and the resolution of conflicts like these that ultimately makes integration work.43

  Özdil doesn’t accept that the state should steer clear of criticizing the behaviour of certain minority groups, as Penninx argues. Nor does he believe that things will simply work out if conflicts run their course. He is adamant that the state must punish certain behaviors. He insists that Dutch officialdom has no idea what they are encouraging and permitting under the guise of allowing groups to practise their own cultures. As far as he is concerned, the government needs to stop “facilitating, stimulating, funding apartheid.”44

  He is particularly worried about Islamic schools—some of them run by Turkish religious figures. People might say kids are performing better than in regular schools, so there’s no problem. But there is. Özdil mentions marketing materials of a Turkish Islamic school featuring photos of a young boy reading a book in Turkish called The Blood of Our Martyrs, written by someone Özdil considers an “anti-Semitic, religious fundamentalist.” To him, it is unacceptable that Dutch kids are reading those books in schools receiving government funding.

  He has also taken heat from the right, who still can’t accept him staking a claim to Dutch citizenship that is equal to theirs. When he invokes American-style concepts like unity in diversity, they bristle. “You want to demolish our eigenheid,” they tell him—using a word that means uniqueness but sounds more like nativeness coming from them.45

  This is hardly a surprising view, his fellow NRC columnist, the veteran journalist Bas Heijne, contends, so long as “being Dutch is like becoming part of a club.” And for many young Dutch Turks and Dutch Moroccans, there hasn’t been a sense of acceptance. Increasingly, the Dutch see these communities as closing themselves off and not wanting to “join us.” Some have tried—he mentions large numbers of Dutch Moroccan men trying to join the police and the army, but they often drop out.46

  Even Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been harmed by such reflexive exclusion. Hirsi Ali spent time as a parliamentarian in the 1990s before she left the country. Her anti-Islamist credentials did not stop her from being hounded and almost kicked out of government when it emerged that some of the information on her asylum application had been false. Likewise, Khadija Arib, a Dutch Moroccan MP who holds dual citizenship because Morocco doesn’t allow its subjects to renounce nationality, was hounded by Wilders when she was elected as speaker of parliament. She was not seen as a real Dutch citizen, says Penninx. “Even if you have this political career” and have been elected to high office, “you’re not taken seriously.”47

  Özdil hopes that a genuine debate about citizenship will occur soon so that his belonging, and that of tens of thousands like him, will no longer be questioned. The risk, of course, is that the Dutch may then start blaming actual foreigners and not just those whom they perceive to be foreign. “My hope is that if citizenship isn’t up for debate anymore, we will be one step ahead,” he told me in early 2016, a year before he was elected to the Dutch parliament. “Otherwise, I’m really afraid. I’m keeping my Turkish passport. You never know,” he says. “We know European history.”48

  3

  THE NATIVIST NANNY STATE

  As the sun rose on a cold morning in October 1943, fourteen-year-old Bent Melchior, adrift in the Baltic Sea with eighteen other people, knew something was wrong.

  On October 1, the German occupying authorities had ordered the arrest of Denmark’s Jewish population. As word reached the Jews of Copenhagen that the Nazis were poised to raid their homes, families packed and fled the city. They paid huge sums to smugglers to secure passage to Sweden by circuitous routes less likely to be discovered by the Germans. Melchior’s family was advised to head south to the island of Falster, several hours from Copenhagen and a roundabout way of getting to Sweden, which is just a few miles by sea from the capital. Melchior found himself on a fishing boat with an inexperienced captain. “He had never been out where he couldn’t see land, so he didn’t know how to navigate,” he recalls. People were becoming seasick and retching. Passengers kept imagining they saw land only to find it was clouds. “After about seven to eight hours, there was land and there was a lighthouse,” Melchior remembers. But the captain, not wanting to moor in the middle of the night, insisted on waiting until dawn.

  Freezing and afraid, Melchior prayed that someone at the distant lighthouse would spot them. “But they didn’t see us. So, we waited and waited until it started to become light hoping to see the sun rise over Swedish shores to the east,” recalls Melchior. But when the sun came, it did not rise where it should have.

  “Even I as a fourteen-year-old knew a few facts,” says Melchior, namely, “that Sweden is east of Denmark and that the sun rises in the east.” Looking out from the boat at dawn, Melchior was terrified to see the sun rising over open water. The poorly navigated vessel had veered off course and was now inadvertently heading back toward the southern tip of Denmark, which was firmly under Nazi occupation. “Had they seen us and God heard my prayer,” says Melchior, “we would have been in the hands of the Germans.”

  As day broke and the captain realized his error, he turned around. The boat was low on fuel when it finally approached the southern Swedish coast. By coincidence, a six-year-old boy saw it far out at sea, and his father, a fisherman, came to fetch them. They reached land at 1:00 p.m. after eighteen hours at sea. Melchior still visits the boy, now eighty, who lives in the same house where they made landfall that morning.

  Seven decades after his dramatic escape, Melchior has become something of a celebrity among Danish Muslims—an odd role for a rabbi who volunteered to serve in Israel’
s War of Independence in 1948. He returned to Copenhagen after the war and became a teacher and then, in 1969, the country’s chief rabbi. In the early 1990s, when a group of Palestinians sought refuge in a Danish church after fleeing Lebanon, there was a debate about whether to allow them to stay. The Danish press and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were shocked when Melchior, in the name of the Jewish community, argued they should remain.

  Melchior’s own background has coloured his approach. He has spoken out for refugees “because I have been a refugee myself,” he says. “He starts at the bottom, and that feeling has never left me.” The rabbi has taken a keen interest in what Denmark’s current government is doing, including running Arabic-language adverts in Middle Eastern newspapers with the aim of discouraging anyone from seeking asylum by warning they won’t get welfare benefits or be able to bring their families. “They are trying to send a message to refugees that Denmark is not a good place for them. Stay away,” says Melchior.

  What the policy makers posting discouraging ads in Middle Eastern newspapers have failed to see, says the rabbi, is that it tarnishes Denmark’s international reputation. Saving most of the country’s Jews in 1943 has been part of that good name, he believes. “They lost it in a few months in 2015.”

  In January 2016, just three months after the refugee crisis peaked, Denmark passed the so-called jewellery law, which stipulated that any valuables worth more than €1,340 would be confiscated from arriving refugees to fund the cost of accommodating them. Editorial pages and columnists across the world lined up to condemn the law; political cartoonists went further, likening Danish leaders to Nazis confiscating Jews’ valuables.

  The press and the far-right Danish People’s Party have tried to portray those who make it to Europe as well-off and not in need of asylum—a suggestion that makes Melchior’s skin crawl.

  “People do not leave their homes without reason,” he insists. “What would they find with the refugees? Do they come here with big fortunes?” he exclaims. The rabbi bristles at the suggestion that refugees are rich, because they sell everything they own and flee with some money in their pockets to pay smugglers and cover expenses wherever they end up. Denmark is always hailed for saving its Jews; it is often forgotten that the refugees of 1943 paid fishermen a fortune to ferry them across to Sweden. Melchior recalls that the amount paid for his passage alone was equivalent to nearly a year’s rent for a six-room flat. “It was money we never had seen,” he told me.

  “Denmark is not a poor country, for God’s sake,” says the rabbi. “We are rich people. There’s food for everybody here, and even if we get a few tens of thousands more people, there will still be food for everybody.”1

  Denmark, like Holland, has been transformed by debates over immigration and integration since the early 1990s, when Rabbi Melchior defended the right of Palestinian refugees sheltered in a Danish church to stay in the country. By the mid-1990s, many Danes were grumbling about the media’s refusal to cover crimes committed by immigrants. To critics, the left’s refusal to confront the dark side of immigration made it complicit in a spiral of silence. And in this growing public discontent, the editors of Ekstra Bladet, a popular daily tabloid newspaper, saw an opportunity. The paper swiftly produced an avalanche of reporting on refugee abuse of the welfare system, including a print and television series called The Foreigners, which featured a Somali man with two wives and eleven children who received upward of £50,000 per year in welfare benefits. The newspaper’s accompanying editorials recommended that the government lower welfare payments for refugees to provide them with incentives to work. This media onslaught immediately captured the public’s attention, and it held special appeal for working-class voters, who saw refugees as competitors for both jobs and benefits.2

  The Scandinavian welfare system has always been premised on solidarity, with everyone paying their fair share and receiving what the state deems they deserve; as countries like Denmark have become more diverse, some of the trust sustaining it has broken down. There has been some abuse of the system by immigrants, some by natives, and a sizable dose of tabloid fearmongering depicting immigrants as cheaters and leeches sucking the system dry, but the larger issue is the growing unwillingness of the native wealthy to subsidize those seen as the foreign poor.

  Defence of generous social benefits and openness to immigration have, since the 1960s, been staples of left-wing politics in Europe and the United States. In the 1980s and 1990s, scholars and journalists, many of them Social Democrats, began to warn that there was an inherent tension between large-scale immigration and a generous welfare state. After all, as numbers grew, expensive social programs would not be able to keep up, they argued. There was both a risk of overburdening and bankrupting the system and creating resentment of new beneficiaries if people no longer supported spending their tax dollars on people they didn’t identify or empathize with. If high earners don’t see poor immigrants as “themselves minus good fortune,” the system collapses.3

  Scholars like Harvard University’s Robert Putnam, famous for the book Bowling Alone, sparked an uproar in academic circles by arguing that more diverse communities have lower levels of trust.4 It is no coincidence, he argued, that the United States has never had a comprehensive cradle-to-grave welfare state like Denmark’s. The political support for state redistribution of resources to people seen as different and undeserving, often on racist grounds, simply wasn’t there.

  In countries like Denmark, which were until a few decades ago remarkably homogeneous, there was greater public willingness to fund a welfare state that aided the socially similar poor. After Putnam’s article, the issue took on a life of its own. In response to a series of critiques arguing that increasing immigration and promoting multiculturalism jeopardized the sense of solidarity needed to sustain a generous welfare state, the academics Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka assembled a team of scholars and devoted an entire volume to addressing the question empirically.

  The authors worried whether declining support for welfare policies might lead to the rise of free-market parties opposed to redistribution. Their stated fear was the “Americanization” of generous European systems and the risk of “right-wing populist parties that combine anti-immigrant nativism with attacks on the welfare state.”5 But they were, for the most part, asking the wrong question: the risk wasn’t the collapse of the welfare state but a nativist defence of it.

  Although most writers at that time dismissed the risk posed by distrust or resentment of new neighbours, some recognized that while the overall minority share of the population didn’t seem to erode support for welfare, rapid changes in the number of new immigrants did. They worried that some voters who had always supported the left’s redistributionist policies might abandon the left if it didn’t make a visible effort to control immigration.6

  Even some of the most enthusiastic proponents of state-led multiculturalism acknowledged the challenge. Sustaining the welfare state wasn’t so much of a problem in places with large but stable immigrant populations; it was in places where the immigrant share of the population was rapidly increasing that the cracks started to show. The book’s critical conclusion warned that European Social Democrats should “begin to worry about potential future trade-offs” between diversity and redistribution.7 By that point, it was already too late.

  The populist right did not come out of nowhere. It recognized an underserved niche in the political market of the 1990s, seized the opportunity, and has never let go. At the same time, the focus of activism on the left shifted dramatically from economic equality to identity, weakening the appeal of parties arguing for redistribution.8 As the Social Democratic Parties across Scandinavia and Labour Parties in Holland and Britain moved away from their traditional blue-collar base and sought to attract voters from the growing educated middle class, their focus and core values shifted. Once upon a time, working-class interests drove political debate; now they have “become spectators in electoral battles for the educated
middle-class vote,” as Matthew Goodwin and Robert Ford argue in their book, Revolt on the Right.9

  It is a pattern that has repeated itself in countless countries. By deftly dividing society into two groups—the pure people and the corrupt elite—populists have attracted those who usually don’t bother to vote and lured others away from the traditional left.10 There is a sense—whether right or wrong—among these forgotten voters that newcomers have not paid their way, becoming free riders.11 As their views on immigration were dismissed as racist or simply ignored, their loyalties to the political left faded.12

  The motivations of voters who abandon establishment parties for the far right are complex. Some are racist xenophobes who resent immigration and are nostalgic for an imagined past when their countries supposedly had no problems. But many are “reluctant radicals” who have grown increasingly angry at state institutions that they see as elitist and undemocratic.13 These voters resent the establishment parties because they have failed to address basic issues like rising housing costs, fraying public services, unemployment, and cuts to welfare benefits.

  When the only politicians who show any interest in their grievances are on the far right, the consequence is the rise of anti-immigrant populism. New arrivals present an easy target for blame, and far-right parties have masterfully manipulated economic anxieties by offering to both shore up the welfare state and stop the flow of immigrants.

  For years, it was assumed that the far right in Europe would stick to an antisocialist economic platform. In 1995, a famous academic study of the far right aimed to define a formula for success for right-wing populist parties in Europe.14 At a time when these parties had barely made a dent in parliaments, the authors, Herbert Kitschelt and Anthony McGann, concluded that in order to win, parties would need to combine commitment to free-market principles with a platform that criticized diversity and multiculturalism.