Protests are planned in the Netherlands in response to a motion accepted by the Dutch parliament to “keep records on cultural and religious norms and values of Dutch people with a migration background”.
A public petition is calling for the motion to be withdrawn and anti-racism campaigners are planning to demonstrate next Saturday against the move by the government, in which the largest party is run by the anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders.
The motion from the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) – part of the rightwing coalition – says “data about norms and values can offer insights into the cultural integration” of ethnic minorities and calls the government “to keep details”, for example through social research.
But Mpanzu Bamenga, an MP for the progressive Democrats 66 party who took Dutch border police to court to overturn ethnic profiling, called it “a new social low” on a LinkedIn post.
“The whole motion has a racist starting point,” he told the Guardian. “It assumes there is a ‘them and us’; that ethnic minorities are problematic and must change to ‘our norms and values’, whatever they are. It is completely arbitrary.”
The Netherlands is in the midst of a heated discussion on integration and segregation after violence, some of it antisemitic, around a football match between Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax of Amsterdam. Rightwing politicians accused Dutch Muslim ethnic minorities of failure to integrate, and the fragile four-party coalition narrowly avoided falling in November, with one junior minister and two MPs resigning over discrimination and the “tone” of debate.
For some, the motion’s title recalls Holocaust memories of the Nazis inviting Jewish people to register with their municipality.
Jelle Zijlstra, a theatre director and activist with a Jewish background, said antisemitism occured across all social strata. “The motivation seems to be that only other people – in this case migrants, or Muslims or people not originally from the Netherlands – are guilty of antisemitism or homophobia or misogyny,” he said.
“But in a few weeks, archives will open and all of the dossiers on [Nazi] collaborators and people who betrayed Jewish people will be visible. I imagine the rose-tinted view that ‘we were all in the resistance’ will be rather undermined.”
Tom van der Meer, a political science professor at the University of Amsterdam, says the Netherlands Institute for Social Research already researches different groups extensively. “There are studies based on samples, emphasising privacy, voluntary participation, studies that are not about individuals,” he said. “The motion is a bit problematic because it suggested that it is about registration – but it can’t be. The framing is consequential because people with a migration background are frustrated.”
The VVD MP Bente Becker, who wrote the motion, said she was appalled if the “upset” had affected people and that it was not a call for a register but for more research on groups in “parallel societies in which some people with a migration background do not subscribe to Dutch values such as the democratic, constitutional state or equality of men and women”.
She told the Guardian, by email: “It is not a plea to investigate one group and leave the rest of the Netherlands out of consideration … [but] to be able to conduct debates about how integration is going on the basis of what is actually happening in society, rather than gut feeling.”
Bamenga, who debated the issue with Becker at a parliamentary committee before the VVD motion was submitted, disagreed. “It isn’t about the intention but the effect,” he said. “Words matter.”