Excerpt:
How many immigrants are arriving in the Netherlands these days? That is a politically loaded question. In fact, an opposition MP recently accused the government of fiddling the numbers to make the number of immigrants look larger.
At first glance that may seem confusing. Prime Minister Mark Rutte's cabinet, supported from parliament by Geert Wilders' Freedom Party, has made reducing immigration a priority. So why would they want to inflate the number of immigrants? Political self-interest, says Green Left MP Tofik Dibi.
'If the problem of immigration goes away, the need for the Freedom Party to continue to support the government for a large part disappears as well. The cabinet has an interest in making the problem seem bigger.'