The growing gap between facts and discourse on immigrant integration in the Netherlands

Abstract

The Netherlands’ recent history of dealing with immigrant integration provides an excellent example of the dangers of thinking in terms of fixed ‘national’ integration models. When first confronted with large-scale immigration, the Netherlands embarked on a policy of multiculturalism. Its current approach is one of the most assimilationist in Western Europe: several in-between forms have also been tried out. This article describes the evolution of Dutch thinking and Dutch policy-making on immigrant integration over the past few decades, and it analyses why the country has switched so frequently from one model to another. The harsher approach of this moment can be explained neither by major shifts that might have occurred in public opinion, nor by the actual course of the immigrant integration process, which has been advancing steadily. The root causes of the growing gap between facts and discourse lie in popular anxiety provoked by profound changes in Dutch society.

Keywords:

• integration models
• immigrants
• Netherlands
• multiculturalism
• assimilation
• public policy

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Han Entzinger

HAN ENTZINGER is Professor of Migration and Integration Studies at the Department of Sociology, Erasmus University, Rotterdam.