It’s not complicated. The pro-immigration people proceeded from a premise that turned out to be false. They thought you could pluck someone out of Syria or Iraq and put them in the Netherlands and the result would be indistinguishable (except in superficial appearance) from descendants of William of Orange. Had that premise proven true, nobody would know Geert Wilders’s name.

But it wasn’t true. It was a conceptual mistake closely related to George W. Bush’s erroneous belief that he could turn Afghanistan and Iraq into America through laws on paper. And that’s had tremendous downstream consequences.

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jacquesm a day ago | parent [-]

> The pro-immigration people proceeded from a premise that turned out to be false. They thought you could pluck someone out of Syria or Iraq and put them in the Netherlands and the result would be indistinguishable (except in superficial appearance) from descendants of William of Orange.

I have absolutely no idea where you got this utterly bizarre notion of what went on in the Netherlands in the last 50 years or so. This is so far besides the point that you probably should just take the L and move on. But on the off chance that you are open to some input:

Syrians and Iraqi people in NL are here predominantly as refugees.

> Had that premise proven true, nobody would know Geert Wilders’s name.

No, we've had Geert Wilders like persons in different guises in the past. None managed to convert it into a life-long jobs program for themselves though.

> But it wasn’t true.

This has to be the mother of all strawmen ever on HN. You are just simply clueless about this.

> It was a conceptual mistake closely related to George W. Bush’s erroneous belief that he could turn Afghanistan and Iraq into America through laws on paper.

That too is completely disconnected from reality as documented in untold millions of pages of history.

> And that’s had tremendous downstream consequences.

Yes, there were tremendous downstream consequences. But you utterly missed the connection about the causes, which in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq go back to 1839 or so.

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rayiner a day ago | parent [-]

> Syrians and Iraqi people in NL are here predominantly as refugees.

What difference does that make? The point is that they didn't start behaving exactly like Dutch people when they stepped on Dutch soil.

	▲	jacquesm a day ago \| parent [-]
		The point is that you strongly suggest that we collectively expected them to do just that, when nobody did that. So it makes a big difference on why they are here, they had nowhere else to go, we made room for them, collectively, and tried to make it work. Not always equally successful but for the most part it did. Their kids are doing a lot better than their parents (I see plenty of them in the schools of my children). But, in an interesting turn of affairs, the same groups that were screaming 'foreigners!!! they'll take our jobs!!! they'll take our women!!! they are not Christians!!!' about Indonesian people in the 60's, Surinam people in the 70's, Turks in the 80's, Moroccans in the 90's, Poles, Romanians, Latvians, Armenians, Iraqis, Iranians, Syrians and Afghans in the two decades after that are perfectly ok with it as long as it allows them to cling to their fears and stoke the division. Never mind that those first waves are now all but indistinguishable from the rest here. There still is a massive disadvantage to being non-white, so Poles, Latvians and Ukrainians have an easier time of it. And it will take a long time before that difference has been leveled, if ever. Unfortunately.