Sunday, Jun. 16, 2002

Integration

By ABI DARUVALLA/Amsterdam

It's midmorning in a nondescript classroom on the top floor of a municipal building in a run-down Amsterdam neighborhood. The students — four men and nine women from eight different countries whose professions range from physicist to truck driver to housewife — are mostly in their 20s and 30s. They're alert and eager as they struggle to answer questions based on a recent newspaper article.

The questions themselves are easy; the hard part is answering in Dutch. Most of the students are recent immigrants who have only been in the Netherlands for a few months, and they are in the first stage of a year-long integration course mandated by the Dutch government. "I had a job in a factory where it didn't matter that I couldn't speak Dutch, but I gave it up to do this course," says Badia Mozouzi, a 28-year-old secretary from Morocco. "Not only to get a better job, but so that I can be independent."

In the Netherlands, language courses have been required by law since 1998 when Minister for Urban Policy and Integration of Ethnic Minorities Roger van Boxtel introduced an assimilation program for new immigrants from outside the E.U. In addition to instruction in Dutch, most new arrivals who are granted residence permits must take courses to familiarize themselves with the Dutch healthcare, education and welfare systems, the labor market and national customs. "The aim is to teach newcomers both their rights and their obligations," says Van Boxtel. "We're not asking immigrants to give up their cultural identity, but they must learn Dutch if they want to live here." Despite their tradition of tolerance, the Dutch are unhappy at the growing number of non-E.U. immigrants coming into the Netherlands. This dissatisfaction was skillfully exploited by the List Pim Fortuyn, which is now part of a governing coalition that plans to clamp down on immigration. Under new laws, only immigrants earning 30% more than the minimum wage of around j14,500 per year will be entitled to bring a spouse into the Netherlands. And those that do get in will have to pay half of the cost of the mandatory assimilation course themselves.

Despite the eagerness of most of the students, one in five of the 18,000 immigrants who start the course every year drops out. Officially, those who fail to finish the course can be fined or have their welfare benefits cut, but in practice that seldom happens. "Newcomers are desperate to learn Dutch, but you can hardly withhold benefits to a woman because she gets pregnant half way through the course," says Annelies Bongers, a social worker with the Bres Foundation in Dordrecht, which guides immigrants through the assimilation process. Childcare provisions are also available, but "many women may not feel comfortable leaving young children in the care of people they don't know," says Bongers. She would like to see a more flexible time frame for completing the course, which now must be finished within a year. The government has begun to deal with such criticism, and courses are now tailored more to individual capabilities and needs.

The courses can be crucial to a new immigrant's successful transition into Dutch society. Lutfullah Sayed, a 50-year-old architect from Afghanistan, learned Dutch as part of the assimilation program. But he also took classes on surveying created specially for him. "I needed to learn technical words and specific skills if I was to get a job in my field," says Sayed, who now works as a draftsman with an architectural firm in Rotterdam. "The classes on Dutch society and traditions helped me to build a relationship with my colleagues, and many of them have become good friends."

Yasin Olcer, a 28-year-old physicist from Turkey, speaks for his classmates when he says: "It is important to speak Dutch and to understand the society you are going to live in." And the Dutch government seems to realize that integration is not a one-way street. "As well as spending money on assimilating immigrants, we must educate the native Dutch population to accept the democratic freedoms other cultures have in our country," Van Boxtel says. All the language courses in the world cannot eliminate discrimination against immigrants, Van Boxtel admits, but the ability to talk to one another is surely the first step toward better understanding.