Dutch Citizenship Research Articles

‘Dutch’ according to children and mothers: Nationality stereotypes and citizenship representation

AbstractThis research examines the endorsement of the nationality stereotype Dutch = White among children and associations with citizenship representations of their mothers (Study 1). Additionally, Study 2 explores how mothers include the concept of Dutch citizenship in the upbringing of their children. Study 1 shows that children (n = 197, 57% girls, 7–13 years old) from different ethnic‐racial backgrounds (White Dutch, Turkish‐Dutch, Black Dutch, Chinese‐Dutch) all endorsed the nationality stereotype and did so to a similar extent. Most mothers rated civic citizenship as more important than ethnic citizenship, but maternal citizenship representations were unrelated to child nationality stereotype. Study 2 shows that mothers often do not actively and consciously include the topic of Dutch citizenship in their upbringing, but might confirm the nationality stereotype in more implicit ways. Future studies are needed to examine how to work towards a more inclusive view of nationality among children in the Dutch context.

Timing of citizenship acquisition and immigrants’ children educational outcomes: a family fixed-effects approach

Abstract Various studies suggest a positive effect of host country citizenship on the educational outcomes of immigrants’ children. However, little is known about when and for whom citizenship matters and how much this is affected by potential endogeneity in the relationship between parental citizenship acquisition and their children’s educational outcomes. Focusing on the Netherlands, this article exploits siblings’ variation in their exposure to naturalization in order to net out the effect of time-constant parental characteristics. Results from a linear mixed model show that children who acquire Dutch citizenship have a substantial advantage in terms of academic performance over those who are still foreign citizens, especially if they naturalized in early childhood. A novel bounding estimator that gauges the sensitivity of the estimates to omitted variable bias confirms the robustness of these results. Moreover, the effects of citizenship are concentrated among students whose parents are at a disadvantage in the labour market and housing market, shedding light on hitherto under-explored effect heterogeneity.

Decolonizing citizenship: democracy, citizenship and education in the Netherlands, 1960–2020

ABSTRACT This article scrutinizes the discursive practices deployed in debates about Dutch citizenship and education from the 1960s to the present using the concept of ‘decolonizing citizenship’. In the four periods analysed in this contribution, links were present between postcolonialism and how citizens in general were addressed within civic education practices. Firstly, in the 1970s, international solidarity and postcolonialism were linked to the domestic project of empowering citizens to become mature, critical democratic citizens. Secondly, this morphed in the 1980s into a progressive project of creating tolerant, antiracist citizens. A postcolonial perspective on education and a critique of everyday racism among white citizens, however, was stymied by the image of racism as limited to ill-behaved right-wing extremists. From the mid-1980s onwards, antiracism also became an element in the project of a conservative pedagogic state, which used early interventions to reaffirm social norms through the education system. This pedagogic state treated both domestic and immigrant populations as objects of ‘integration’, to combat individualism and reaffirm social cohesion. Thirdly, in the 1990s these evolutions fit a conservative backlash, and its obsession with a civic education that reaffirms notions of national cultural identity. Finally, since the 2010s, a renewed postcolonial, self-proclaimed ‘antiracist’ movement has contested these tendencies by attacking cultural symbols and demanding curriculum changes. This movement, led by people of colour, has begun to reframe the national narrative in favour of a more pluralistic vision of the Netherlands.

Citizenship and education trajectories among children of immigrants: A transition-oriented sequence analysis

During recent decades, the educational outcomes of the children of immigrants have been extensively studied, with a growing emphasis on the heterogeneity of the so-called second generation. Yet, the impact of host country citizenship on children's educational outcomes has only received limited attention so far, although children of immigrants do not get automatic birthright citizenship in most European countries. Focusing on the Netherlands, this paper compares educational trajectories among citizen and non-citizen children of immigrants. Register data and sequence analysis are used to map and cluster the trajectories of a full cohort of second-generation students from the start of secondary school. We apply a variant of optimal matching focusing on sequences of transitions, which enables us to uncover different patterns of (im)mobility within a stratified school system better than the standard approach. Multinomial logistic regressions show that students who acquire Dutch citizenship are significantly more likely to follow upward trajectories, taking advantage of the system's flexibility and "back doors". Conversely, not having Dutch citizenship is associated with a higher risk of dropout and school interruptions. These findings are in line with our theoretical expectation that, during the naturalisation process, parents acquire or further develop important resources for navigating a complex educational system such as the Dutch one.

Citizenship acquisition and spatial stratification: Analysing immigrant residential mobility in the Netherlands

Whereas the so-called ‘citizenship premium’ in the labour market has been widely studied, we know little about how naturalisation affects immigrants’ lives beyond work and income. Focusing on the Netherlands, this paper analyses the relationship between citizenship acquisition and immigrant residential mobility, in particular the propensity of immigrants to move away from areas with high concentrations of migrants. We draw on register data from Statistics Netherlands ( N = 234,912). We argue that possessing Dutch citizenship reduces spatial stratification by diminishing the risk of housing market discrimination, thereby facilitating mobility outside of migrant-concentrated areas. Our findings show that naturalised immigrants are 50% more likely to move out of concentrated neighbourhoods, all else constant. The effect of naturalisation is especially relevant for renting without housing benefits and for home ownership, and for mid-risk immigrants who earn around the median income and hold permanent jobs, whose applications face strong scrutiny from landlords, rental agencies and mortgage lenders.

“They [the Jews] Show Me a Nation Full of Flaws.” The Political Use of Jewish Stereotypes by Jews and Non-Jews in the Netherlands (1796–1798)

Abstract This article investigates the political use of pejorative images of the Jews during the debates on granting the Jews Dutch citizenship and in the polemical writings of the newly founded maskilic Ashkenazi community in Amsterdam. It will demonstrate that pejorative images of the Jews were used to demarcate the boundaries of identity, not only by the non-Jewish Dutch inhabitants, but also by the Dutch maskilim. This article sheds light on the interplay between politics, stereotyping and identity construction.

The intergenerational impact of naturalisation reforms: the citizenship status of children of immigrants in the Netherlands, 1995–2016

ABSTRACT For many children of immigrants to Europe, being born in a European country does not give them rights of citizenship. To acquire citizenship of the country of their birth, they typically rely on their parents’ naturalisation. While many European countries have tightened requirements for citizenship over recent decades, the impact of new regulations on immigrants’ children propensity to naturalise has gone largely unexplored. This paper analyses the impact of two restrictive legislative changes in the Netherlands: the re-introduction of a dual citizenship restriction in 1997, and the introduction of civic integration requirements in 2003. Using register data and event-history models, we analyse the acquisition of Dutch citizenship by children born in the Netherlands between 1995 and 2010 to immigrant parents. We find that the dual citizenship restriction puts families off naturalising while mandatory civic integration sees them postpone naturalisation. The intergenerational impact of naturalisation reforms is also reflected in the extent to which both parents are involved in the naturalisation process. Children eligible under stricter requirements are more likely to naturalise with one parent instead of both, in contrast to earlier eligibility cohorts. These findings shed light on key family dynamics in the acquisition of host country citizenship.

Dutch Criminal Justice for Ethiopian War Crimes

Abstract The past few years have witnessed a proliferation of universal jurisdiction proceedings in Europe, many of which concern asylum seekers suspected of committing international crimes in Syria and the wider region. Alongside the known practical challenges of such trials, these trials also raise a range of normative questions regarding inter alia the scope of universal jurisdiction and the applicable legal standards in such proceedings. This article unpacks several such questions through the lens of a recent Dutch case in which a former refugee, who was granted asylum in The Netherlands and later obtained Dutch citizenship, was tried and convicted by a local court in The Hague of war crimes committed in Ethiopia four decades ago. The judges used an amalgam of Dutch and (customary) international criminal law to convict the accused. They defined the charged war crimes in strict conformity with the standards established in international legislation and jurisprudence, relied exclusively on Dutch law to define one of the applied modes of criminal liability (co-perpetration), and synthesized Dutch and international law to define the other (command responsibility). To what extent does the notion of universal jurisdiction accommodate such choices of law, and how is the use of domestic criminal law on modes of liability in such proceedings compatible with the principle of legality?

A ticket to mobility? Naturalisation and subsequent migration of refugees after obtaining asylum in the Netherlands

ABSTRACTResearch on migrants to European countries commonly assumes that with naturalisation, migrants’ futures are closely linked to the receiving country. However, from a transnational perspective, citizenship acquisition does not necessarily lead to permanent settlement. Apart from the right to stay in the country, citizenship provides for extensive mobility rights and the freedom to settle elsewhere. This mobility premium may be particularly acute for refugees, and previous research indeed shows that EU citizenship is key in their international movement. Yet, knowledge of the demography, socio-economic profile and scale of subsequent movement of new citizens of refugee background is limited. We therefore test the ‘naturalisation-as-a-ticket-to-mobility’ thesis for a large and heterogeneous group of refugees who received asylum in the Netherlands. Based on longitudinal data, we follow an entire cohort of refugees registered in the Dutch municipal registers between 1995 and 1999 (N = 60,218) over a period of almost two decades. We examine for whom and under which conditions naturalisation results in subsequent international migration. Results from Cox models reveal that citizenship acquisition is generally associated with settlement in the Netherlands. However, for refugees receiving welfare benefits and those with a ‘weak passport’ prior to naturalisation, Dutch citizenship increases the likelihood of subsequent migration.

Double standards? Attitudes towards immigrant and emigrant dual citizenship in the Netherlands

ABSTRACTDespite increasingly liberal practices around the world, dual citizenship acceptance is still contested. Surprisingly, few studies exist on what drives public attitudes towards political membership in two or more states. Based on data from the 2012 Dutch Parliamentary Election Study (N = 1,677) we investigate the discrepancy in negative attitudes in the Netherlands towards dual citizenship of immigrants who acquire Dutch citizenship, on the one hand, and more positive attitudes towards Dutch citizens acquiring a foreign citizenship, on the other. We find that negative views of immigrant dual citizenship are associated with strong in-group identification and out-group derogation, whereas experiencing a sense of symbolic group threat is associated with negative views of both immigrant and emigrant dual citizenship.

Regulating Mixed Marriages through Acquisition and Loss of Citizenship

Mixed marriages have always had an ambiguous and often problematic relationship with the law. On one hand, mixed marriages have been seen as a key indicator of sociocultural integration into mainstream society. In terms of the law, this perception has been expressed, for example, as privileged access to citizenship status for immigrant family members of citizens. On the other hand, mixed marriages have been seen as a threat to society and social cohesion. In this article, I argue that these contradictory perceptions of mixed relationships have informed the development of citizenship law over time. Building on literature on the regulation of mixed marriages in law, as well as gender and citizenship law, I use the Netherlands as a case study to demonstrate how citizenship law has been used as a tool to prevent certain types of “undesirable” mixed couples and how this approach has informed Dutch citizenship law until today.

Postcolonial citizens and ethnic migration: the Netherlands and Japan in the age of globalization

1. Post-Colonial and Ethnic Migration and Political Incorporation in Liberal Democracies: Locating the Dutch and Japanese Cases 2. Convergence? Globalization and the State Policies in the Production of Post-Colonial Citizen and Ethnic Migration 3. Old and New Nationalisms, Pre-migration Political Legacies 4. What Does Post-Colonial Dutch Citizenship Mean in Political Terms? 1985-2008 5. Constructing the Nation: Japanese Emigration and Immigration from the late 19th to 21st Century 6. Is Blood Thicker than Water Politically? Latin American Nikkeijin in Japan 1990-2008 7. Political Transnationalism in Question: What Limits the Political Transnationalism of 'Transnational' Groups in Liberal Democracies 1985-2008? 8. Conclusion- Inheriting the State: Contextualizing the Future of Post-Colonial and Ethnic Migration and Political Inclusion

Dutch civic integration courses as neoliberal citizenship rituals

The neoliberalization of the Dutch citizenship manifests itself through the responsibilization, contractualization, and marketization of civic integration. We conceptualize civic integration courses as a neoliberal citizenship ritual the migrants are required to participate in to earn Dutch citizenship. By studying the practice of Dutch civic integration, we demonstrate the repressive and productive aspects through which migrants and course providers become objects and subjects of the state's neoliberal citizenship ideology. Our ethnographic data enable us to understand how civic integration is experienced and interpreted by state agents and migrants. Cost optimization and quantitative policy targets have dominated; the quality of Dutch language teaching suffered, leaving the migrants without the power to vocalize and realize their own interests. The courses have become rituals to prepare for the civic integration examination, and the state's professed goal to create self-reliant citizens has been comfortably neglected in the shadow of a ritualized success story.

From Brown Dutchmen to Indo-Americans: Changing Identity of the Dutch-Indonesian (Indo) Diaspora in America

Indos are people of mixed Dutch-Indonesian descent, whose history can be traced to the Netherlands’ 300-year colonization of Indonesia (Dutch East Indies). As an “in-between” people, Indos were accorded the privileges of a Dutch colonial class situated above the native Indonesians, but placed below Europeans in terms of status. Despite their Dutch citizenship, the Indos were often marginalized due to their distinctly hybridized culture and “mixed” physical appearance. During the Japanese occupation of the East Indies, however, the Indos’ political-historical association with the Dutch subjected many among them to numerous persecutions. Similarly, this “Dutch” identity would also place the Indos on the opposite side of the Indonesian independence struggle, creating their massive exodus to the Netherlands after the Second World War. In Holland, Indos were treated more like foreigners than compatriots and often referred to as “Brown Dutchmen.” This drove many Indos toward further migration across the globe, including the USA. In America, first-generation Indos were reluctant to share their traumatic history and instead encouraged their young ones to fully embrace “Americanhood.” Despite this, many among the younger generation have begun to show a collective interest in reconnecting with their Indo heritage. Without an existing homeland however, these “activists” have resorted to intense cultural imagining as a way to locate and define their place as Indo-Americans. Using a multi-theoretical approach, this article critically analyzes the historical journey of the Indo-American diaspora and the shifting identities the group has assumed as they transitioned from one political economic environment to another.

Asylum seekers, citizenship and reality TV in the Netherlands: quizzing refugees in jeopardy

This article interrogates a Dutch jeopardy style TV show, Weg van Nederland, featuring young, well-educated asylum seekers about to be deported. The TV program, devised in collaboration with the advocacy group ‘Defense for Children,’ performed the paradoxes resulting from the ‘inclusive exclusion’ of asylum seekers. Yet, its strategy of inscribing the contestants into the space of citizenship by highlighting their ‘rootedness’ through the quiz format also lent support to the exclusivist, essentialist understanding of national belonging that is produced in contemporary Dutch citizenship and integration law. Moreover, the show's focus on successful, thoroughly integrated and career driven young adults, while pragmatic from the perspective of the show's (limited) political objectives, also reproduced the preferred template of neoliberal citizenship, which drives the European migration regime and its policy of selective in/exclusion. These contradictions expose the possibilities, as well as the limitations, of humanitarian appeals working within the contemporary media regime, including reality TV, which imposes its own generic terms (and ideological inflections) on the justice claims launched within its public arena.

Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Spectropolitics and Immigration

In the context of the Dutch immigration debate, tributes to the Holocaust and the memory of Europe’s dead Jews increasingly serve to dismantle multiculturalism as a failed paradigm and to drive a wedge between a revitalized, redeemed, color-blind, post-racial Europe and disenfranchized immigrant, minority and Muslim populations. Embedded in these invocations of the Holocaust and its moral imperatives is a ‘spectropolitics’ of tolerance, in which tolerance, staged as an essential touchstone of Dutch identity, supplies a differential norm that measures the civilizational and racial disjuncture between Europeans, minorities, and Muslims, and validates the new dual paradigm of Dutch citizenship and immigration policy: securitization and disciplinary integration. The centrality of the Holocaust as paradigmatic of Dutch and European racial history meanwhile sidelines the colonial past as constitutive of European identity; displaces an alternative understanding of race as (bio- and necro-political) instruments of colonial rule; and disavows the continued application of these instruments of racial rule in Dutch and European post-colonial societies.

Immigration as a Colonial Inheritance: Post-Colonial Immigrants in the Netherlands, 1945–2002

As in France and Britain, immigration into the Netherlands after World War II is partly an inheritance of the country's colonial past. In this paper we consider four post-colonial migration flows to the Netherlands, two from the East Indies—the Eurasian population known as ‘Indische Nederlanders’ and the Moluccans—and two from the West Indies—the Surinamese and the Antilleans. We examine the factors that have been crucial for the integration (or non-integration) of these immigrants into Dutch society. Although all these immigrants may be labelled ‘post-colonial immigrants’, the term is misleading to the extent that it suggests homogeneity. A wide variety exists as to the volume of the migration flow; the composition of the immigrant population—social class, ethnic origin and cultural background; the timing of the migration and the perceptions and expectations of the immigrants. The context of reception also varies considerably, due to the economic situation at the time of arrival, government policies vis-à-vis these immigrant groups and the perception and acceptance of them by the general public. Two factors seem to have been of the essence for the integration process: Dutch citizenship and the amount of ‘cultural capital’—in the form of school attainments and familiarity with the Dutch language and culture—that the immigrants already possessed before migrating to the Netherlands.

Women's Labor At Display: Feminist Claims to Dutch Citizenship and Colonial Politics around 1900

Inspired by their American and Danish counterparts, some five hundred Dutch women organized a national exhibition devoted to "Women's Labor" in 1898. The event took place near The Hague, lasted three months, and attracted over 90,000 visitors. The conscious and political focus on women's labor intended to show the ways in which women contributed to the Dutch nation and advocated decent employment for women as a prerequisite for citizenship. Many forms of women's labor were depicted, such as factory girls working behind machines and women from the East Indies demonstrating arts and crafts. At the exhibition conferences, teachers, social workers, and nurses spoke about their professions. This article tells the story of how the women's movement in a small, Western nation with a large colonial empire used an exhibition to put women's social position on the political agenda. In doing so, Dutch women transformed the public sphere.

The language of newcomers: developments in Dutch citizenship education

A new citizenship policy in the Netherlands is intended to provide ethnic minority newcomers with self‐management competencies for their daily lives, further education and employment. The advocates of the compulsory language training that is the main ingredient of this policy argue that it will foster newcomers' chances of getting jobs, accessing education and being incorporated into the mainstream of Dutch society. According to the Scientific Council for Government Policy, no country in Europe has gone as far as the Netherlands in terms of its citizenship policy. In this paper, we evaluate the backgrounds and the consequences of this policy, and we take a critical look at the attempt to present command of the Dutch language as the main road to integration for ethnic minority newcomers.

The expectation(s) of solidarity: matters of justice, responsibility and identity in the reconstruction of the health care system.

We analyse solidarity as a mixture of social justice on the one hand and a set of cultural values and ascriptions on the other hand. The latter defines the relevant sense of belonging together in a society. From a short analysis of the early stages of the Dutch welfare state, we conclude that social responsibility was originally based in religious and political associations. In the heyday of the welfare state, institutions such as sick funds, hospitals or nursing homes became financed collectively entirely and became accessible to people of all denominations. Solidarity was transformed in a more general category, related to the status of Dutch citizenship. Responsibility was transformed to collective responsibility. Financial pressures on the Welfare State have resulted in a debate on choices in health care and in a number of system reforms, so far relatively small. In the surrounding discourse, justice was linked to private responsibility. Both from government officials and from participants in the societal debate, moralistic overtones could be heard concerning the threat of overburdening of the health care system by citizens. In this paper, we develop a concept of reflexive solidarity that links elements of social justice to conceptualisations of responsibility that address policy makers and health care institutions as well as citizens, in their role of care receivers. A short analysis of the phenomenon of personal budgets in care services should prove that our concept of reflexive solidarity is not empty. Linked to, but beyond the concept of justice, issues of social responsibility can be addressed without moralistic overtones.