Little Netherlanders and Islamophobic buffoons

In the eyes of the drooling clowns who use words like ‘dhimmified’ and who believe there’s a serious chance we’ll end up ruled by sharia unless we Lock Up All Ay-Rabs Now, the Netherlands is on the front line in the Muslims’ attempts to destroy the West through excessive breeding.

According to their narrative, the EU constitution ‘no’ vote was a last-ditch cry from the Dutch Volk against evil Brussels’s attempts to fill Holland with Koran-bashing types. This is a little odd, given that the EU forces member states to impose tough restrictions on extra-community immigration (and given that there aren’t actually any Muslim countries in the EU), but it’s important not to overestimate the power of logic when dealing with a Volk.

The analysis on why the Dutch actually voted ‘no’ has been done to death elsewhere. More interesting is where the narrative of “Holland besieged by immigrant plague” came from in the first place. We know who brought it to the fore – a nasty bigot who, largely because he was queer, didn’t get treated with the contempt he richly deserved [*]. But does it have any real-life backing?

Serendipitously, my job last week was to compile statistics about ethnic minority and immigrant populations across the EU. This is harder than it might sound – while the UK has an excellent national statistics office that tabulates the relevant data extremely well and makes it available online for free, most other countries don’t. Some (such as France) don’t tabulate race data at all.

So 4.3% of the inhabitants of the Netherlands are immigrants, compared to 3.5% of Brits, 9% of Germans, and 6.2% of Americans [**]. This could be enough to explain Mr Fortujn’s rise. After all, the UK’s 3.5% concentration has encouraged more knuckle-dragging Neanderthals to support the BNP than would be ideal, as well as encouraging slightly less mental people to oppose further immigration.

It doesn’t, however, explain why the Netherlands is perceived as on the front line of Islamoloonic Badness. Surely Germany ought to be on the front line? And even if you’re mad enough to believe the UK has an immigration problem, there’s no reason to conclude from these stats that the situation in Holland is significantly worse.

As hinted at in the first article linked above, some commentators take a slightly different tack, and suggest that the problems are concentrated in Amsterdam and the other big cities. While the rural Netherlands is still a paradise of clogs, cheese and windmills, the city streets are infested with weird goat-slaughtering men in dresses [***], and therefore decent Dutch burghers feel unwelcome in their own towns.

There could be a serious point here. In the UK, support for the BNP is concentrated in places like Burnley, which are very poor and have high immigrant populations – broadly because it’s much easier to blame the Pakis for your lack of education, skills and employment than it is to do something about your own status. So if immigration to the Netherlands were strongly concentrated in poor, urban communities, the resentment seen (and perceptions that the Muslims are in charge) could partially be explained.

The OECD publishes an annual migration survey, Trends in International Migration (subscription required). It includes a chapter looking at geographical dispersal of immigrant populations, using a measure called the Adjusted Geographic Concentration index. In a country with an immigrant AGC of 1, all the immigrants live in the same place. If the AGC is zero, the immigrants are spread out among the population with no clustering effects. The ‘adjusted’ bit takes into account things like the size of one’s country.

As anyone who’s visited both Burnley and Basildon might have spotted, the UK appears to have quite a bit of immigrant clustering. Indeed, the British AGC is 0.41 – slightly below the heavily US, which has an AGC of 0.44. France, Italy and Spain all have AGCs around the 0.3 mark. The Netherlands has the lowest AGC in Europe: just 0.13. This means that immigrants in Holland are less ghettoised than immigrants anywhere else. And that means that the Burnley theory is simply wrong, and that the people above who claim the big cities are under threat are fools and liars.

Could it be the opposite? While Burnley’s local idiots were out voting for the thugs this May, equally misguided people in heavily white areas such as Basildon were out voting for comedic, white-collar, non-thuggish anti-immigration parties. This isn’t because they’re threatened by immigrants – there aren’t any. Rather, they’re threatened by the idea of immigrants, and haven’t encountered enough real-life ones to realise they don’t pose a threat. They haven’t been to Ealing Road or Stamford Hill; they just know that Weird Things happen there.

The Netherlands’ demography may be such that there actually aren’t enough areas of high immigrant concentration. The foreigners are so spread out that everywhere in the country resembles a giant Basildon, and there aren’t any majority-ethnic-minority areas that people can look at and view as shining successes in the same way that there are in London or New York.

This leaves a sizeable minority of the locals far more paranoid about immigration than they really ought to be, since they fear what would happen should the number of foreigners increase further. These types fall for hysterical lies from the likes of Mr Fortujn, genuinely believing that the Netherlands’ liberalism is under threat from Muslims. And the dhimmi-mongers are all-too-happy to seize on and fuel this paranoia for their own, weird and bigoted ends.

[*] Instead, he was treated with an assassination that he didn’t deserve.
[**] All unsourced data is calculated by me based on national statistics, OECD, UN, EU and published commercial sources.
[***] Not these men in dresses, interesting though the history of the Dutch Scots community is.