No one who has read this blog over the years can accuse me of having closed my eyes to the problems which have accompanied large-scale Muslim immigration to Europe, but there's a clear divide between taking sensible measures to contain a problem before it gets out of hand and pandering to the rawest prejudice - a line which Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party have marched right past.
Under current law the third generation children of immigrants in Holland are classified as Dutch, in terms of government statistics and entitlements, as long as both their parents were born there.
But the anti-Muslim Freedom Party is concerned that by treating the grandchildren of immigrants as Dutch, 80 per cent of whom are under 10 years old, it will stop being possible to measure their integration.
Joram van Klaveren, a Freedom Party MP, has called for the change because, he claimed, unless third generation migrants are included in statistics as "allochtonen" then proof of immigration related crime would disappear.
"Non-western immigrants are still over-represented in the crime figures. Soon we won't see that anymore because they will be classified as natives," he told the nu.nl news website.
But "natives" are precisely what they are, unless one subscribes to the same belief system underpinning the Nuremberg Laws, and as is clear from van Klaveren's remarks, it isn't immigrants from Ukraine or Moldavia he has in mind, even though he uses the term "non-Western." What he's pushing for is a government registry of "non-Aryans", plain and simple; "third generation immigrant" is an oxymoronic term whose real meaning is "non-White."
Between this latest proposal and the recent passage of a law against ritual slaughter of animals - itself recycling the very same arguments presented so well in a certain 1930s classic* - one can only suppose that the next step would be for Geert Wilders and company to push for all those tainted with "third generation immigrant" blood to only venture out in public with some sort of easily spotted identification - purely for the purpose of monitoring their assimilation, of course ...
PS: I've just run into an informative post which should help make clear that I have indeed interpreted van Klaveren's remarks correctly. The "allochton" nonsense in the Netherlands is really about skin color, not where you happen to be born or which culture you were raised in, and is based on the conception of people of non-white descent as being essentially inassimilable into "Het Volk".
*Note to the slow-of-thought: I'm being sarcastic.
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