Allochtonen Weblog Roundup

Allochtonen Weblog is a Dutch language blog that collects news about the immigrant community in the Netherlands. Here’s a few interesting stories they’ve had this week.

A group of highly educated “whites” have decided to send their kids to the neighborhood “black” school - the 25 parents live in predominantly immigrant neighborhoods in Amsterdam-West and have united in a new venture “samen naar school” (together to school). The idea being that they don’t want their kid to be the only blond kid in school, and yet they don’t want to send their kids to learn in far off schools either.


Illegal immigrants are not without rights – a booklet named “Basic rights for undocumented” (Basisrechten voor Ongedocumenteerden) has been put out to teach people that being illegal doesn’t mean having no rights and being open to exploitations.


A new initiative for a ‘more reasonable integration policy’ – a new initiative is calling to stop forcing old immigrants to go through “integration courses”.

The immigrant workers from Morocco, Turkey and other non-western countries and their children, the so-called second generation, have a large share in building the prosperity of our society. Invited by the Netherlands, they established themselves here and worked hard for the development of this country, under very bad labour circumstances and mostly in sectors with the hardest and dirtiest jobs. For decades the government didn’t care about the situation of these immigrants and didn’t provide sufficient possibilities for them to learn the language and to participate. “Work, work and more work”, was the message.

Now the government wants to force these, often aged, immigrants to integrate into society. That means that these immigrants will be forced by law to learn Dutch and pay for it themselves. Within 5 years they must pass an exam to prove that they master the language. If they do not succeed, they will risk a fine. A very nasty way of saying thank you!

(from the English version manifest)


The Dutch Intelligence Service (AIVD) is not responsible for closing the Al-Fath mosque in Tilburg – the mosque was supposedly closed as it didn’t conform to fire-safety regulations, but a Dutch-Moroccan site accused the AIVD of closing it because of suspicions of extremism.


Leftists Turks in the Netherlands threatened – GroenLinks has asked for explanations and protection after leftists Turks have complained they’ve been threatened by national rightist Turks. A member of GroenLinks withdrew from a symposium on the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide after such threats (Turkey still denies there was such a genocide).