Dutch professor Maurice Crul has said that with the ever increasing number of migrants and migrant background people living in the Netherlands, that the native Dutch should just get used to being a minority.
A professor at the Free University in Amsterdam, Crul says that in the larger cities in the Netherlands white Dutch are already a minority and that such trends will follow in smaller cities and towns as well, Dutch newspaper Trouw reports.
“In Amsterdam the time has come: there this group is a minority. Only one in three young people under the age of fifteen is of Dutch descent,” Professor Crul said and added, “If you want to know how the integration is going, you also have to look at that group. Who adapts to whom if there is no majority anymore?”
“The first guest workers were a small migrant group in a dominant culture. With the second and third generation that is an outdated idea. Integration now works in two directions,” he said adding, “This way a Turkish Dutch person can become your new manager. Or your child is in the minority at school. That is the new reality that the old ‘dominant majority’ will be confronted with.”
Crul, along with a team of eight researchers, recently received 2.5 million euros from the European Research Council to conduct studies on the subject in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Antwerp, Malmö and Vienna.
The remarks echo those made by German politician Barbara John last week who wrote that Germans should not be worried about becoming minorities in their own cities.
Professor John, a member of Chancellor Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), wrote, “The trend towards the rapidly growing proportion of migrants is irreversible.”
She also referenced Rotterdam and Amsterdam as cities where native peoples were a minority despite issues both cities have faced with migrant communities from Turkish rioters to Moroccan gang violence.
Other academics, like Professor Angelika Redder, have even advocated that Germans should learn Arabic rather than expect new migrants to simply learn German saying, “we can do something that shows us as being open to other languages. This may be enriching for both sides.”