Wooden Shoes, Wooden Heads

Asylum policies in the Netherlands. Never I understood much about it, and coincidentally I did some research on it a few months ago. It became apparent to me that even though the policy is clear, the system does not function. The Immigration and Naturalization Office makes decissions on the status of Asylum seekers (should you stay or should you go), on the basis of non-transparent and unaccessible research. Often 'Country Reports' issued by Dutch embassies are used as a basis for decissions. Putting six country reports next to each other made it clear to me that there is no guideline on how these reports should be presented, let stand what should be in it! Can you believe this....

A couple of years ago a popular politician introduced
the idea of 'civilisation courses' for immigrants to the Netherlands. The idea became a hype and Rita Verdonk, our current Minister of Strangers (this is the literate translation of her Minister post) now even defines an immigrant as: 'Somebody who did not succesfully passed the civilisation exam'. Welcome to the Netherlands. I see it as one of the defenses against the 'scaring approach of the Jihad', one of the most wrongly understood words in the West. The Netherlands is slowly loosing its identity and reflects its sadness about that on those who come new. For me it's close to pure Islamophobia, or even better: foreignophobia.

Of course the idea behind the civislisation course, which is more a culturalisation course, is not bad at all. It aims to provide foreigners with knowledge on the Dutch culture, language, values and principles. I would like to follow the course as well, because I'm extremely interested to learn about the for me unknown Dutch Standards as well. Standards.

Standards. I'm currently in the preparation of a training on EU perspectives for Balkan states for gay activists in that region. A team member from Belgrade this week rightly mentioned: "What are EU standards actually?," when I proposed to have a training component on EU standards. He made me realise that we are often talking about non-existing standards.

I think that it's actually one of the biggest challenges in the globalization: meeting standards. I would logically say that this is always a mutual process. But in the Netherlands we like delegating so we give this huge responsibility to our foreign guests!

Let us first decide what our new identity is. All people should talk about principles and values, not only our 'guests'. And then I propose that when we decided what our national identity looks like, we all go to school again.

This week my favourite Dutch party expressed its doubts about the functioning of the Immigration and Naturalization office. Finally! It made me decide to finally become a member of the party.