A Belgian gentleman deemed it necessary to warn against the appointment of Aboutaleb as mayor of Rotterdam on his website. I could jeer many things. I could argue Belgians are naturally pre-disposed towards stupidity, I could argue they haven't had a functional country and government for about a year now and I could argue they should mind their own damn business. But at the core of the matter, De Winter (No relation, thank you) claims three things I would like to react to.
Firstly he's saying that Europe is being "Morocco-nized". The funny thing is that the Turks are being left out of the loop completely, while in countries like Belgium, Germany and Holland, the amount of Turkish people roughly equal the amount of Moroccan people. In Holland, the amount of Moroccans is quite stable. Around 350.000 people are of Moroccan descent, and the amount of third and fourth generation Moroccans that lets go of Islam as a religion is quite staggering, so all in all the amount of people subscribing to "different religions" than Christianity (49%) or Atheism (44%) is on the decline. In the mean time the Catholic Church is becoming more orthodox in nature under the new pope, making them more dangerous than the moderate Muslims in the country.
If you leave all that aside, the stone-cold numbers tell us that there are 34 Million Moroccans on this planet. Most of them are located in Morocco. The migration rate is -0.77 migrants per 1,000 population. At any given time, Morocco sends 26.000 people abroad in any given year. With a world population of 7 billion people, those 26.000 are quite negligible. Holland "gets" 3.44 migrants per 1,000 population per year. That's a 0.3% increase in the population annually due to migration. Given the low birth rate and the aging of the population, I would argue this is a good thing.
The breakdown of foreigners in Holland is as follows: 20% of Holland is not Dutch. 10% of the population are "Western Immigrants" from other EU States and the US and whatnot. 10% are "Non-Western Immigrants" from our former colonies like the Antilles, Suriname, Indonesia and then of course the Turks and the Moroccans. 350.000 Moroccans equals a 2% slice of society, which in turn is only 10% of the total amount of foreigners in the country. To me, this implies that far from *all* of those 26.000 Moroccans that leave Morocco actually end up in Holland and, I'm quite sure, Belgium.
Hence I fail to see the Moroccans as a "Demographic threat".
Now the second aspect of De Winters' statement is that the fact that Aboutaleb became mayor of Rotterdam will "exacerbate the arrogance of Moroccans throughout Europe". I don't think the Moroccans are the most arrogant part of Europe's population. For that we have the French and obviously elitist fascists like Wilders, Haider, Le Pen and De Winter. Aside from that that I think many Moroccans, who are de facto second rate citizens in European countries, could view Aboutaleb's appointment as a beacon of hope. If you assimilate, learn the local language, get educated and work with the system, you, as an immigrant, can reach a position of power. It is living proof that the Constitutional Rights a Dutchman has also work for citizens of foreign origin.
Lastly De Winter goes through great lengths to point out Aboutaleb has dual citizenship. So what? If it's legal it's legal. As long as Aboutaleb does a good job and is the owner of a valid Dutch passport, I don't care what other things he's got going on. Is De Winter herewith suggesting that my son Daniel can never hold a job of significance in the Netherlands because the kid also has an Israeli citizenship and passport? The way I see it, Aboutaleb is not violating the law in any way, and he's not exactly becoming the prime minister either.
If he were to become the nation's leader or the supreme commander of the armed forces in Holland I would indeed argue that he can't morally hold two nationalities, but as Mayor of Rotterdam I see no dangerous conflict of interests. Quite the opposite, Aboutaleb has been quite harsh on misbehaving citizens of Moroccan descent, and he's in a unique position to be just that without getting slandered as a racist.
As a partian shot I would like to react to De Winter mentioning Rotterdam, the Netherlands and "our cities" in one sentence. Coming from a fascist Belgian I find that highly offensive. We have nothing to do with these people. Remember Van Speyk, asshole? "Dan liever de lucht in!". Mind your own business and stay on your own damn side of the border. You're rather less welcome here than the Moroccans. At least they bring good food.
Posted by Chris at October 19, 2008 11:23 AM