The Economist Aug 24th 2013 by The Economist

Author:The Economist
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: News, The Economist
Publisher: The Economist
Published: 2013-08-23T08:01:08+00:00

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Dutch immigration

Overflow

Worries about workers from eastern Europe are changing Dutch politics

Aug 24th 2013 | EEMSHAVEN |From the print edition

THE Eemshaven landscape is as Dutch as can be imagined: broad pastures and grain fields, punctuated by canals and the stately houses of 18th-century planters. The huge new power stations rising at this northern port evoke modern Dutch design, with rectilinear Mondrian-like turbine housings and aquamarine lights. But missing from this perfect Dutch landscape are Dutch people. The 5,000 workers are overwhelmingly Polish and Portuguese, housed in container units stacked in fields.

After a year of recession, with unemployment rising past 7%, the Dutch are increasingly resentful of immigration and of the European Union’s rules that make it unavoidable. Last week the vice-prime minister, Lodewijk Asscher, tapped the resentment. In a newspaper opinion piece co-written with David Goodhart, a British pundit, Mr Asscher likened rising migration to a “Code Orange”, Dutch parlance for a severe flood warning. “In some places,” he wrote, “the dykes are on the point of breaking.”

Mr Asscher represents the Labour Party half of the Netherlands’ centrist coalition, led by the Liberal prime minister, Mark Rutte. Both parties are threatened by anti-immigration rivals: the Liberals have been leaking voters to the far-right Freedom Party of Geert Wilders, while Labour has lost even more support to the far-left Socialists. Under EU rules, work-permit requirements for Bulgarian and Romanian citizens are due to expire on January 1st, and Labour is worried that an influx of new immigrants would expose it to attack.

The dyke-break metaphor is a hoary one in Dutch politics, but it touches deep roots. As Simon Schama observed in “The Embarrassment of Riches”, a history of the Netherlands’ golden age, such imagery abounds in the literature of the country’s 16th-century war of independence. It blended the political threat to the country’s existence with the physical one. During the euro crisis Mr Wilders slammed Mr Rutte’s government for “throwing money over the dykes” to bail out Greece. Another Labour politician has complained of a “tsunami of east Europeans”.

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