Go Back to Where You Came From

by Sasha Polakow-Suransky

  Given the left’s stubborn resistance to low-wage jobs for refugees, Soei believes that seeking to change the left-wing parties’ position is a lost cause at the moment. The focus, he argues, should be the unions, which he believes aren’t being honest with the rank and file. The reason that the unions are opposed to the idea, argues Soei, is that they are worried about losing members. If they admitted to their members that refugees are doing work that Danes won’t do and that Eastern Europeans, not refugees, are taking Danish jobs, then things would get better. “The political question is actually, do you want to be in solidarity with Eastern Europeans coming to Denmark to work here normally for a couple of years and go back, or do you want to be in solidarity with newly arrived citizens who are going to stay here?” says Soei.

  The DPP simply wants these people to leave, so it has no interest in analyzing their skills or credentials. “They want people to move out,” he says. “But if you look at the rest of the parties in Denmark, then it seems like a big mystery why we haven’t done better.” If the issue is framed as refugees taking jobs currently done by Eastern Europeans, then, he says, union members will accept it.22

  Although they do not agree on much, Berth and Soei both believe Danes are effectively choosing to show solidarity with Eastern European temp workers rather than refugees who hope to remain in Denmark. “The fact that we have the chance for workers to move freely inside Europe has made it even more difficult to get refugees employed,” explains Berth. An employer faced with the choice of hiring a Dane who wants a competitive salary, a refugee who speaks no Danish or English, and an Eastern European who speaks English and is willing to work for minimum wage or less is likely to choose the Eastern European.23

  The DPP is also angry about Eastern European immigrants taking jobs, but one doesn’t hear as much about Christian Poles as Muslim Danes on the radio or in parliament. The Danes call cheap EU labour “social dumping,” with Eastern Europeans working for fifty or seventy kroner (five to seven pounds) per hour with no safety regulations. Construction workers undercut by Polish builders might resent Poles more than Muslims; for them, social dumping is a major threat. Among the broader population, though, there is a different take. Many Danes see the Polish builders as a cheap and convenient way to get their home repairs done but are convinced that Muslim immigrants are criminals or terrorists.24

  The DPP seems to have calculated that there are more votes to be won with the latter argument. Or, as the refugee law expert Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen puts it more bluntly, “The best thing that could have happened for Jews or Poles is that Muslims came to the EU.”25

  The debate about immigration and welfare hasn’t been without its contradictions. The free-market right, when it lets principles take precedence over current political fads, favors free movement. Many on the left, as Soei’s clashes with his leftist friends revealed, say they want to help refugees but balk at letting them work at lower wages out of fear that the welfare state will be undermined. Seeing the op-ed editor of Denmark’s leading conservative paper argue for it didn’t help sell it to the left.26

  Nevertheless, Danish unions and employers have managed to hammer out a small-scale compromise with the government to experiment with an hourly “introduction wage” of as low as 49 kroner (five pounds)—a sort of internship period—for refugees. It has been a very limited success. By October 2016, only thirteen eligible refugees had taken part in the program, and many traditionalists on the left remained worried that it would undercut wages for Danish workers.27 But there are others on the left who insist that letting refugees work, especially skilled ones, rather than sitting around taking courses or receiving benefits, will not destroy the welfare state.

  The same is true in Holland. The historian Leo Lucassen sees a great political irony in the strange bedfellows that have emerged. “You have this coalition of elite ultraliberal right-wing employers on the one hand and ultraleft people who think that we should have open borders,” he says. He is sceptical of those who foresee an implosion of entitlements under the burden of new refugees, simply because Holland has absorbed large numbers before without major economic consequences. In the 1990s, the welfare state didn’t implode, and it isn’t falling apart in Germany, which absorbed ethnic Germans from the Soviet Union and Balkan refugees in the 1990s and is now absorbing Syrians. Unless the numbers really skyrocket, there won’t be a collapse, insists Lucassen.

  Nevertheless, the implosion argument is being used by Dutch free-market parties who have never had any great affinity for the welfare state and who now argue that immigrants “will wreck our society because they don’t subscribe to Western liberal values.”28

  Danish free-market parties have shifted in the same way because they don’t worry about alienating union voters the way the Social Democrats and DPP do. The free-market Liberal Alliance party used to campaign under the libertarian slogan, “Open borders, closed coffers”; anyone could come, but no one should automatically be entitled to welfare payments. These days, the party leader, Anders Samuelsen, says, “If you stay in Denmark, you have rights and it’s very lucrative … Staying in Denmark with no social security, it would be a different situation.”29 While this position is distinct from the nativist defence of welfare offered by the DPP and is motivated by a desire to dismantle the welfare state rather than restrict who benefits from it, the impact on refugees is the same. It prompted the former youth leader Rasmus Brygger to leave the party.

  “I think a lot of people on the right wing like these ideas, but they don’t like them in practice, because for them it means getting more Muslims here,” Brygger explains. One of the most discussed issues in the Liberal Alliance, he says, was “Well, we can’t open the borders until we have closed out the welfare state, and since that’s not going to happen, we need to close the borders.”30

  During the 1990s, many Muslims refugees came to both Denmark and Holland from Bosnia, and they integrated quite well. The difference between the 1990s and today is that since 9/11, Muslims have become associated with terror. In the 1990s, there was grumbling, but people were complaining that the refugees cost money, not raising the specter of cultural conquest and calling for de-Islamization.

  For Lucassen, work—or at least the chance to work—might actually be the solution. He believes that the labour market could solve many of the problems if only it were politically palatable to say so. Looking at the migration of Eastern Europeans coming to Holland and other wealthy EU members, “the labour market regulates these migrations quite well, and people contribute much more than they take out.” He advocates expanding this system to the border regions of Europe, allowing anyone who passes a security check to come and seek work. Countries could even demand that they pay a deposit. The message would be “Good luck, but if you don’t find a job, you’re on your own,” and they could only draw benefits after a certain amount of time, which would encourage regular work or going home.

  With such a policy, getting to Europe would be safer and cheaper—the cost of a plane or ferry ticket. It would also put the smugglers out of business instantly. Of course, Lucassen admits, “it’s possible that a billion refugees or asylum-seekers will be on our doorsteps as of tomorrow; then you have a problem, because there are limits,” but the right’s argument that the EU has reached this saturation point is, he says, “bullshit.”

  The labour market approach could eventually work, he believes, just not in this political climate. Like Australia, with its untilled fields and offshore detention, Holland is too “locked in this populist anti-Muslim nativist kind of atmosphere to really think clearly.”31

  12

  THE RISE OF WHITE IDENTITY POLITICS

  Thierry Baudet is the slick-haired sophist behind the Dutch new right. He runs a think tank called Forum for Democracy, which has now transformed into a political party. His group helped support the successful April 2016 referendum against an EU association agreement with Ukraine, earning his party the label “pro-Russian” in some circles.1
He has referred to Bashar al-Assad as the only solution in Syria. “Once the neoconservative folly in Syria is over and we just restore Assad to power, and [sic] things will go quiet, which is what we should do,” he argues. As for the refugees, “they can go back,” he says breezily.2 His website features photos of him lying atop pianos, he boasts of his time studying with the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton at Oxford, and he has been named the most important public intellectual in the Netherlands—by himself, but apparently no one else.3

  Baudet is dismissive of politicians. “They are incredibly stupid people.… They are essentially brain-dead,” he told me in April 2016. “I think their lives are incredibly trivial and their brains show incredibly little activity.”4 In late September, Baudet declared his intention to become one. And in March 2017, he and a colleague from his new party won two seats in the country’s 150-member parliament.

  His work often reads like a repackaging of foreign ideas for the Dutch market.5 Baudet wrote a book called Oikophobia (Greek for “fear of one’s own home”), a treatise on self-hatred expressing ideas very similar to his professor Scruton’s own essay on the subject.6 He also once studied under Paul Scheffer before tacking sharply to the right, and some of his writing on the importance of borders has strong echoes of his onetime mentor’s work.7

  Baudet relishes attacking the left for abandoning its own ideals. “It’s so obvious that the Muslim immigrants bring with them a whole set of premodern values … which are at odds and in conflict with so many things that the left has been fighting for,” he argues. But rather than merely denounce the left’s well-known hypocrisies on issues from the Rushdie affair to the Khmer Rouge, he goes further. Baudet believes the left never even cared for ideals like women’s rights. “They were tools to destroy something. They were actually not in favor of feminism; they were just against the patriarchal society,” Baudet argues.8

  He goes on to cite the heavily footnoted but academically tenuous work of the PVV’s second-in-command and the brain behind Wilders, Martin Bosma. In 2015 he wrote a book denouncing the Dutch left’s support for the anti-apartheid movement on the grounds that the movement’s objective “was to destroy the stronghold of the West” in South Africa, as Baudet puts it. Bosma’s book argues that South Africa’s white Afrikaners—who ruled over a disenfranchised black majority for almost fifty years—have in the democratic era been reduced, as the books title states, to “a minority in their own land” and that the native Dutch will face a similar fate as a Muslim great replacement usurps Holland.9 Baudet believes the current silence toward the excesses of fundamentalist Islam is “maybe because the left is not really interested in justice and human rights and all those things, but actually they are interested in destroying the West. That’s their real agenda.”

  Baudet sees the future of Europe taking one of four paths: the Israel scenario (terrorism, military in the streets, low-intensity violence); the South Africa scenario (what he believes to be a mass exodus of whites); a utopian Canada scenario (successful multiculturalism); or what he calls the “reverse Algeria option,” an academic way of describing a forced population transfer. As he puts it, “The Algerian option where four million French people that have been living there for two generations were just pulled out, thrown out of the country. And that’s also an option, that there will be such a big conflict that Europeans will, like they did in 1492, reconquer their lands,” or, in other words, to follow his analogy, to expel the Muslim “settlers” from Europe.

  Baudet claims he longs for a rosy Canadian scenario. “I really hope for the Canadian model; I think every sensible person hopes for it, but I think the Israeli model is more likely,” he says. And to avoid that, he believes the first sensible step is “to stop immigration from Muslim countries and to try whatever we can to have a program of national integration and everything,” but he doesn’t have much faith it will succeed.

  He brings up Scotland and Catalonia—odd examples for an ardent proponent of reclaiming a strong national identity. “Spain failed with Catalonia, the English failed with Scotland,” and treading on even thinner ice, he adds, “the Germans tried to integrate the Jews for a thousand years.”

  Quickly backtracking from an argument that might call into question his vehemently pro-Israel public persona, he says, “I don’t think Judaism as a religion has many rules that are opposed to a liberal society, which I think is the case with Islam.” (Evidently, he has never seen an ambulance pelted with stones for the sin of driving through an Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood on Yom Kippur.) His disturbing reference to the ostensibly poorly integrated German Jews who were murdered by Nazis, he assures me, was just to point out that “there are not many examples of successful integration of different ethnic, cultural, religious groups into societies.”10

  Like Wilders, Baudet is full of praise for Israel and the Jews.11 But unlike the stage-managed party leader who wears his Islamophobia on his sleeve, Baudet’s ethnic nativism lurks just beneath the surface. As in France, there is a fantasy on the Dutch right of purging the society of unwanted “colonizers”—by which they mean Muslim immigrants—who they insist must leave or be expelled.

  When it comes to the contemporary Dutch debate over refugees, Baudet is uninterested in discussing strains on the national budget. “I don’t think the problem is essentially about money.… I think it really is about the very legitimate concern that these people might not be here to join our way of life.” He worries about a violent breakdown of society, and although he believes that his ideas and the right-wing politicians espousing them will win in the end, he concedes gloomily, “there is a very probable scenario that we will just lose.… It’s very possible that in fifty years Europe will not exist anymore.”12

  Or more precisely, Europe will not exist “as a predominantly white-skinned, Christian or post-Christian, Roman-law-based kind of society that we know it as today. It might be some kind of Middle East, Arabian kind of world.”

  Cultural and demographic anxiety about dwindling native populations and rapidly increasing immigrant ones—especially Muslims—lies at the heart of all nativist parties’ platforms and the theories that underpin those political programs. Many of them can be traced to the apocalyptic visions of Enoch Powell and Jean Raspail, the two men who Renaud Camus, France’s Great Replacement theorist, cites in an epigraph to his book.

  Even Christopher Caldwell, the most thoughtful and measured of the right-wing commentators on Islam and immigration, opens his book with a reference to Powell, pointing out that the author of the notorious “rivers of blood” speech was mathematically correct even if he was considered morally beyond the pale. In other words, he accurately predicted the number of nonwhite Britons who would be living in Britain in the early twenty-first century. For that demographic projection, Powell deserves some credit—less so for the paranoid vision of the Tiber, or the Thames, foaming with blood.

  Caldwell adopts the same vocabulary as Baudet when talking about immigrants as colonizers. “If one abandons the idea that Western Europeans are rapacious and exploitative by nature, and that Africans, Asians, and other would-be immigrants are inevitably their victims,” he writes, “then the fundamental difference between colonization and labour migration ceases to be obvious.”13 This leaves out the small matter that European colonialism was enforced at the barrel of a gun by settlers with political and economic control, whereas Muslim guest workers had to receive permission and visas before coming to do menial jobs in Europe.

  Caldwell makes a legitimate argument when he asserts that large numbers of religious Muslims could change Europe’s culture in significant ways; he is on far less solid ground when likening the arrival of impoverished factory workers to the brutal Belgian conquest of Congo, slipping from reasoned argument into the nativist paranoia of Renaud Camus and Jean Raspail.

  Caldwell also falls into the trap of assuming some sort of Islamic exceptionalism in the realm of reproduction. Muslims, he warns, “might not go through the same
demographic transition that their hosts did. Muslim culture is unusually full of messages laying out the practical advantages of procreation,” as if Catholicism and Orthodox Judaism do not similarly encourage believers to have large families.14 Indeed, it’s the same sort of argument one heard about Catholics in nineteenth-century America or that is common today among secular Israelis resentful of their ultrareligious compatriots who often have a dozen children and receive state benefits.

  More importantly, it is an argument that ignores the data on demographic convergence between immigrants and natives after one or two generations, often due to the cost of living. Furthermore, there is no evidence in Europe that religiosity of any sort increases birth rates. In Europe, the countries with higher church attendance (Poland and Portugal, for example) have the lowest fertility rates. It is staunchly secular countries like Iceland and Denmark and Sweden that have the highest birth rates per woman.15

  As with the Republican congressman Steve King, who praises Geert Wilders and worries about the impossibility of restoring “our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” the fear on the European right is about who is having the new German or Danish babies and the fact that it is not white Germans or Danes.16 This is best captured by Thilo Sarrazin’s borderline eugenicist rant against immigrant reproduction in his book Germany Abolishes Itself. Sarrazin’s two greatest fears are a declining white population and the number of kids being born to less-educated parents, who, in his view, are always immigrants. He cites Darwin in arguing that acquisition of intelligence is hereditary and warns that if the low-educated population grows faster than the highly educated (because immigrant women, whom he believes are intellectually inferior, are at the moment having more babies than whites), then Germany will disappear.17