The new cabinet wants to reduce migration, but Prime Minister Dick Schoof does not mention any target figures in his very first debate with the Lower House. The cuts in education and research were mentioned in passing.
The country has all sorts of concerns, Dick Schoof said on Thursday in the debate on the government statement. ‘The biggest of those concerns is asylum and migration. That is, however you look at it, the salient point. Many people are convinced that labor migration, student migration and asylum migration, added together year following year, put too much pressure on our country.’
According to Schoof, the housing shortage among students is partly due to migration. Imagine that as a student you ‘cannot possibly get a room’, he said. Geert Wilders (PVV) also made a connection between the housing shortage and migration.
Toxic politics
Stephan van Baarle (Denk) was one of those who opposed it: ‘It’s regarding failed policy, regarding a government that has not invested enough for years to keep social housing up to standard. Blaming people with a different background for this is poisonous politics,’ he told Wilders.
‘The number of knowledge and student migrants puts far too much pressure on our cities and drives up the price of housing’
Jimmy Dijk (SP) criticized the false contradictions in politics. ‘There are no conflicting interests between people who cannot find social housing, young people and students who are looking for a room and starters who want to buy a house. Our housing has become so commercialized that at the moment no one can find affordable housing anymore. This allows investors and slum landlords to fill their pockets.’
However, the SP also wants to limit migration. Dijk: ‘The number of knowledge and study migrants puts far too much pressure on our cities and drives up the price of housing. That is why this migration must be severely limited.’
Targets
‘Don’t forget that migration is not just regarding asylum migration’, Pieter Omtzigt (NSC) emphasized. ‘In fact, labor migration is a much larger flow with much larger consequences. Study migration, with 40 percent of first-year students coming from abroad, should not be underestimated either.’ Incidentally, that percentage only concerns universities, and not colleges and vocational education institutions.
Joost Eerdmans (JA21) asked the new prime minister regarding ‘inflow targets’. ‘We choose to reduce migration, but we do not commit to targets’, Schoof replied. According to him, that would be too complicated.
How do we know if the policy is effective enough, Eerdmans insisted. According to Schoof, the migration policy is going well if we ‘bring in the right and fewer students’ and also if we ‘bring in the right knowledge migrants, which the economy needs’. He also wants fewer asylum seekers.
Schoof: ‘I am the prime minister of all Dutch people’
Thierry Baudet went further and wants remigration of ‘people of sometimes the second or third generation of immigrants in the Netherlands, who may or may not have two passports’. He would like to send them with fifty or a hundred thousand euros to the country where he thinks they come from.
Those people are rooted here and feel Dutch, Schoof replied. Everyone is free to emigrate, but he did not push for it. ‘Once once more, I am the prime minister of all Dutch people.’ Baudet would later submit a motion on the subject, which only received support from the SGP during the votes.
Cuts
The debate also touched on the cuts in knowledge and education here and there. Rob Jetten (D66) praised the previous cabinet, of which his party was a member. ‘In recent years, universities and colleges have been able to give hundreds of researchers permanent contracts thanks to those enormous investments in education. As a result, there is now more security for those people. They can do more research and provide better education.’
The new cabinet is putting an end to that, he believes. This would also have consequences for the economy. According to Jetten, chip manufacturer ASML wanted to expand in the Netherlands and not in France because the previous cabinet was prepared ‘to invest extra in technical education and innovation’, he said. ‘We are a few months further and then the new cabinet grabs all that money away once more.’
‘Thanks to huge investments, researchers can provide better education’
Dilan Yeşilgöz denied the consequences. The investments around Eindhoven will continue, she said, and innovation does not depend only on the universities. ‘They are a very important source for that, let that be clear, but it is also regarding how we retain all the knowledge in our country, so that entrepreneurs see the space to innovate.’
Alternative
Apart from the cuts, how do the government parties actually view science and other institutions? Frans Timmermans (GroenLinks-PvdA) was one of the parties to lash out. For the first time, a party with extreme right-wing ideas is participating in the government, he said.
‘It includes people who propagate racist conspiracy theories and attack journalists, judges, scientists and elected representatives. These people dehumanize Muslims and refugees and make them suspect by saying that they are parasites and that they spread diseases. That is an image that was also stuck on Jews in the darkest years of European history.’
Timmermans turned his gaze outward. ‘Throughout the centuries, it has been the contacts, exchanges, clashes and merging with everything that is different that have brought us renewal, innovation, discoveries, breakthroughs, growth, prosperity and well-being. That has always been accompanied by challenges, sometimes very serious ones, like now. But ‘closing borders’ has never been the right answer to that.’
Wilders resisted and found it incomprehensible that other parties accused the PVV ministers of racism. Prime Minister Dick Schoof also denied that there were racists in the cabinet.
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