The Netherlands is faced with mass immigration. The left has opened the flood gates. Integration has failed. None of this is true, say brothers Leo ( Social history professor at Leiden University) and Jan (senior research fellow at the Amsterdam history institute ISSG) Lucassen in a new book.

Nrc Next picks out three immigration myths the authors are debunking in their book Winnaars en Verliezers – een nuchtere balans van vijfhonderd jaar immigratie. (Winners and Losers – a balanced look at five hundred years of immigration).
Myth 1: The Netherlands is faced with mass immigration.
The country is being flooded by migrants, especially low skilled Muslims. Wilders says this will turn Europe into a kind of Eurabia.
According to figures from economic research forum NYFER, mass immigration occurs when 25,000 migrants enter the country in one year. If you look at the numbers for the last two decades you’d say this was well and truly the case: around 120,000 people a year settled here. But a lot of people left. If you deduct the leavers from the newcomers, the figure stands at 40,000. That is still more than the NYFER norm but includes Dutch nationals, Europeans, highly skilled Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Indians and a fair number of adopted children (around 10 percent). Migrants, in short, who are not perceived as a problem.
A look at the statistics for people who are (Moroccans, Turks, Antilleans and Somalis), tells you that their number is much lower – 3,900 a year between 2006 and 2009. As for the Moroccans, who loom large in the immigration debate, the numbers are lower still. In fact, more Moroccans left the country in 2007 than came in, and in 2006 only 54 settled here. Hardly mass immigration but nevertheless the term popped up ever more frequently in the language of journalists and politicians alike. The Lucassen brothers conclude that politicians created ‘a parallel reality’.
Myth 2: The left has opened the flood gates.
The leftwing elite was responsible for getting the immigrants here and then failed to face the consequences.
Pim Fortuyn is largely responsible for this interpretation, adept as he was in putting himself forward as the first to tackle problems related to immigration and blaming the left for being to politically correct to act.
This is not the whole story either.
First of all, it was not the left but the right (VVD and what is now CDA) that ruled the roost for most of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties when hundreds of thousand of mainly Turkish and Moroccan migrant workers were allowed to come here. The PvdA wasn’t keen at all: cheap labour from abroad would mean the bargaining position of the Dutch workers would suffer, if they had any jobs left at all. The concept of ‘family reunion’ was also a rightwing one. It was the Christian ideal of the family as the corner stone of civilisation. Having their families here would surely make the workers tow the line. But combined with mass unemployment it lead to the creation of a new underclass.
The PvdA support for multiculturalism came in the Eighties when Janmaat’s Centrumpartij was gaining ground. It was born of the fear of an extreme rightwing movement rather than the conviction that migrants were Dutch citizens like everyone else.
At the end of the eighties the taboo on speaking out about immigration-related problems came to an end.
Myth 3: Integration has failed.
The integration of migrants has failed: they are sitting at home, they are unemployed or become criminals. They don’t really want to integrate. Islam is not compatible with our Jewish-Christian tradition and that is the reason Turks and Moroccans reject our democracy.
Leo Lucassen points out that the first integration paper, from 1983, specifically said that migrants had to adapt to Dutch culture and law. ‘Now politicians want us to believe that this is the first time this has been demanded of immigrants.’ But has integration failed or not?
Young Antillean and Moroccan criminals are undoubtedly a big problem. They grow up in the streets without parental guidance and without positive role models. It is true that people over 12 with a non-western background figure more prominently as crime suspects (5 percent in 2007 compared to 1,6 percent of the native population) but, says Lucassen, if you compare the crime statistics of non-western youths with native Dutch youths whose parents are unemployed there is not much to choose between them.
The children of migrants still lag behind in education but are doing much better than twenty years ago. In 2009, 80 percent had a job in spite of discrimination in the labour market.
Islam is often quoted as the big barrier to integration. But research shows that only a small part of the Turkish and Moroccan communities shut themselves off from Dutch society for religious reasons. In this they are no different from orthodox Christian or Jewish groups.
The so called ‘second generation’ is moving towards adopting Dutch culture and taking on Dutch values, such as equality between men and women. Most of its members consider themselves Muslim but half visit a mosque only a few times a year or not at all.
This is an unofficial translation