Just a pawn in political chess game of Dutch immigration policy

HAGUE LETTER: The Dutch public is uneasy at the state's threat to return a teenager to Angola

EVEN THOUGH immigration is a hot topic in the Netherlands, stories like this one tend to stir a deep-rooted sense of public unease: an Angolan boy who arrived here at the age of 10, without his parents, is due to be deported back to his native country just because he has turned 18.

For the government, the problem about such difficult cases – which are becoming more and more common – is that not only do they tug at the national heart-strings, but they offend against that great Dutch quality, common sense, as well.

What, comes the inevitable question, is the point of spending public money raising and educating this child for eight years only to send him back to a country he barely remembers just as he is about to become a productive, probably tax-paying, Dutch citizen? That’s the first problem for the government; the second problem is that it has no convincing answer.

The teenager, Mauro Manuel, has been living with foster parents in the southern province of Limburg since 2003. He was taken in by the state.

He speaks fluent Dutch, he has schoolmates, he has never been in trouble. And now he is being given a one-way ticket home – where there is nothing waiting for him.

Not alone that, but although Angola’s 27-year-long civil war ended in 2002 and there were elections in 2008, its political governance remains highly questionable.

Despite vast mineral and petroleum reserves, it has some of the worst life expectancy and infant mortality rates in the world.

Mauro’s case has been taken up by Socialist Party MP Sharon Gesthuizen, who has described the deportation decision as “inhumane and wrong”.

Immigration minister Gerd Leers initially took a hard line but last night agreed to “look again” at the teenager’s circumstances, not because anything material had changed but because campaigners had succeeded in getting a majority of MPs, including those of Leers’s own Christian Democrat party, to back a review.

Should such a campaign be necessary? Well, the reality is that this 18-year-old – like the 14-year- old Afghan girl, Sahar, who escaped deportation earlier this year – is little more than a powerless pawn in the political chess game that Dutch immigration policy has become.

It is just days since new statistics were published showing that it will probably now be impossible for the Dutch government to meet its target of halving non-Western immigration by 2015 because virtually no progress has been made since the Liberal-Christian Democrat coalition came to power last year.

The importance of those figures – as Labour leader Job Cohen pointed out – is that they undermine the basis on which Geert Wilders and his anti-Islam Freedom Party (PVV) have been keeping the government in power by supporting it in parliamentary votes.

The post-election deal was simple: Wilders would keep the coalition in power and support the €18 billion package of cuts in last week’s budget, as long as the government progressed the PVV’s anti-immigrant agenda, the most important single plank of which was halving immigration from non-Western countries by 2015.

As a result, Cohen challenged Wilders to now let the coalition government collapse – on the basis that the deal for his support had become meaningless.

“Wilders supported the budget cuts despite the fact that Henk and Ingrid [the typical middle-class couple] are picking up the bill, but even though he’s not getting what he wants in return, he still says ‘let the government stay’.”

So, although the figures no longer add up, the best Wilders and the coalition government can do is continue to act tough on immigration unless they want to take the risk of plunging the country into an unwanted general election at the most difficult time economically in a generation.

The problem is that that get-tough policy is beginning to seep into more immediately problematic areas, specifically Holland’s relations with Eastern European countries such as Poland and Romania, many of whose nationals came here to work after their EU accession in 2004 but now find themselves unemployed.

Some critics – rightly or wrongly – see the Dutch decision to veto an expansion of the Schengen open-borders agreement to include Romania and Bulgaria as partially motivated by this same anti-immigrant agenda.

The problem is that while politicians debate and the public watches game shows in which failed asylum-seekers show how well they understand Dutch culture, a certain 18-year-old Angolan and his foster family are facing a knock on their door in Limburg some morning soon.