Everyone from another country who comes to live in the Netherlands will in future have to sign a ‘participation contract’ showing that they endorse Dutch civil rights and the constitutional state, Social Affairs Minister Lodewijk Asscher announced yesterday.
“Cultural integration is faltering, there is even some regression in ways of looking at homosexuality, at Jews, at women. We must make what makes this country so wonderful clearer: The freedom to be yourself," said the Labour (PvdA) minister in an interview with De Volkskrant newspaper.
In the paper, Asscher elaborated the Integration Agenda, which he sent to the Lower House on Tuesday evening. He wants to have every migrant who registers in a Dutch municipality sign a document intended to make clear to them the standards and norms in the country where they are living and working. “Otherwise, we will pay an enormous price for lack of engagement," warns Asscher.
The ‘participation contract’ should also apply to migrants from the EU, Turkey and the Antilles. These groups were exempted from the integration exam introduced a few years ago.
Asscher will develop the plan with the municipalities. There is a strong chance that it will mainly have a symbolic value. Within the Kingdom and the European Union, residents are allowed to locate themselves freely, without obstacles. For Turks, there are separate rules under the association treaty with the EU.
Asscher nonetheless hopes to make the contract as forceful as possible. “We will investigate what is legally feasible. Lack of engagement on civil rights leads to erosion. If you no longer dare to state what equal treatment really means, you encourage large groups of people not to find that important any longer.”
For this reason, Asscher also considers it important that the integration exam for migrants from outside the EU should be expanded with questions on Dutch values. The exam is currently mainly focused on language skills.
The Vice-Premier hopes that he can pilot the integration debate into a new phase in the coming years. “We must stop explaining why everything does not work. We must set the norm.”
Asscher believes that the EU has in the past decades put too much emphasis on free movement of labour “without a clear eye for the problems that this brings." The minister wants to make it clear that “men and women have equal rights, as do homosexuals, that the faith makes no difference, even if you do not believe any more. That in our country, there is individual freedom.”