A NEW survey has caused shock in the Netherlands by showing that one in three refugee families is living below the poverty line – a situation which a leading immigrant support agency says is expected to worsen.
The survey, by the national statistics office, CBS, also shows that just 10 per cent of asylum-seeker families have an income of €30,000 or more a year, while across the Dutch population as a whole, 50 per cent of households earn €30,000 or more.
The CBS said the poor financial situation in which the refugee families found themselves was due to three crucial factors – inability to find work because they didn’t speak Dutch, the fact they had not been in the country long, and that their finances had been drained by the cost of uprooting.
The findings are likely to increase popular anger over the number of immigrants from non-western countries and from the newer EU states living on social welfare – anger which has turned the right-wing Freedom Party led by Geert Wilders into Holland’s third-largest political force.
On the other hand, however, the figures – which were commissioned by the Dutch Refugee Council – tend to undermine the populist Dutch view that refugees and other immigrants have been successful in taking jobs that would otherwise be available to Dutch nationals.
The anti-Islam Freedom Party called on the minority coalition government yesterday to extend the formal definition of non-native or allochtoonresidents to include third-generation immigrants – a demand that has already generated resentment among ethnic minorities.
Freedom Party MP Joram van Klaveren argued that the current system, which automatically classifies third-generation immigrants as Dutch nationals, made it impossible to establish how well or otherwise they were integrating into Dutch society.
At the moment, he pointed out, some 80 per cent of third-generation immigrants were under 10 years old – a demographic he claimed would inevitably begin to skew certain crucial statistics over the next decade, or even sooner.
“The fact is that non-western immigrants are still over-represented in the crime figures – but soon we won’t be able to see that any more because they will be classified as natives. That is simply not acceptable in terms of knowing what is going on in our country.”
The plight of refugees living in the Netherlands is likely to worsen rather than improve, according to the immigrant support agency, Vluchtelingenwerk, when new government measures to make refugees pay for their own integration and language courses become law.
“This is a vicious cycle”, said the agency’s spokeswoman, Dorine Manson.