A few days ago, someone seemed to suggest that my situation is more or less the result of illegal migrants in the Netherlands putting pressure on the system. (And that the Dutch givernment cares greatly.)
Bollocks.
If you’re illegal, you don’t have access to anything. If you don’t have an official registered address in the Netherlands, you don’t exist.
I don’t exist any longer either. If I needed medical assistance, I would have to go to the United Kingdom. (Yes, I have the Dutch nationality. I was born and raised here and so were my parents.)
I knew nothing about the plight of migrants until I moved from Amsterdam to England.
I’d previously emigrated to the United States and although the restrictions of my visa hampered me and I ran into misunderstandings such as that foreign employees of a State don’t have to file income taxes – plus very occasionally some nonsense about sex and drugs or wooden shoes, tulips and windmills and Denmark – I never felt discriminated against.
When I emigrated to England, however, government politicians and others were spouting so many vicious lies about “my kind” that it forced me to start pondering the situation of migrants in the Netherlands too.
I supposedly was from a poor country called the Netherlands and I supposedly had come to the UK because there were more opportunities there than in the Netherlands or to get its supposedly much more generous social security benefits (which you could not even get in the UK for the first five years and in order to start qualifying, you had to make an appointment and show evidence of your income) and I supposedly was a thieving drug addict and lying about my affiliation with the University of Southampton. It got stale. (Initially, I thought that some people simply behaved in really odd ways.)
And yet, in 2020, Home Secretary Priti Patel called us all “low-skill” and “low-wage” and vowed to reduce our numbers as if we were vermin to be exterminated… I’ve included her in the video below that I put together to call out the utter hypocrisy and nazi-rhetoric of these lying politicians.
Priti Patel is the daughter of Ugandan/Indian migrants. Geert Wilders is the son of a woman from the Asian country that has the world’s largest muslim population (Indonesia) and is, just like his pal Trump, married to a foreigner (Hungary). Some interesting psychology at work there… Do they have a deep-seated wish to get get back at their parents and their spouses for some reason?
Three years later, English newspapers revealed that PM Boris Johnson had planned a military raid on a vaccine plant in Leiden, the Netherlands, to steal vaccines for a disease of which he had previously said that it was just something that those weak foreigners could not handle but that would never affect the British.
And that is how I know that most of the utter nonsense being spouted in the Netherlands about illegals, and refugees and foreigners and people such as myself who have lived abroad for a long time and can no longer be trusted is just that. It is utter nonsense aimed at sowing fear and gaining fearful people’s votes.
Right-wing statements of supposedly left-wing Dutch politicians don’t help.
Globally, I dearly miss the powerful moderating influence of “Mutti” Angela Merkel and also that of Jacinda Ardern.
So when someone said “As-salamu alaykum” to me the other day (peace, shalom, namaste), I replied “Salaam”. (I’d previously asked someone whether it was okay for me to say this, and he smiled and said “yes”. It’s not said in England, you see, at least not as openly, but likely often enough when no semi-indigenous people are around.)
Part of the problem with the Netherlands is that it has made a whopping shift to the right in the past two decades – hence to “not caring” – and that it wants to regulate every sneeze and cough and requires you to have to apply for a license for sneezing and a license for coughing and that if somehow, all license applications are automatically rejected, it comes up with a third and fourth and fifth regulation to regulate the failing regulations instead of simply fixing what’s wrong.
The horrific childcare tax credits disaster STILL has not been resolved. A repeat is around the corner and many victims of this travesty are still stuck, waiting, waiting, waiting for the Dutch state to step up and do what it should do.
(The Netherlands now seems to be pervaded by thought policing, too. How dare you call out the emperor for not wearing any clothes?)
Btw, does anyone know why WordPress.com does not recognize ENGLISH?
