Integration, emancipation and the like

Yesterday Saturday 23 the Kleurrijk Platform organized a discussion around the integration question. First among us, and later with the expert in this issue from our parliamentarians, Naima Azough, we debate how much each side of the duo newcomer-resident should fit to each other, and how do we understand the relation inbetween integration and emancipation. And about that second issue is that I’ll write here.

Around a year ago the political leaders of Groenlinks, our delegation in the national congress, produced a nota on the spiny issue on integration. In the last years the presence and adaptation of foreigners of first and even second generation to the Netherlands has been an issue of increased tension and attention. So our party also wrote down her position. When at the Kleurrijk Platform we read the document, we could hardly believe the print. Funnily enough, the Kleurrijk Platform is the workgroup for migrants inside our party, so you could imagine that we were involved in the thinking of a position on integration. That was not so. And we did not -quite- agree with the print.

Our party, undoubtedly, is what you could call an emancipation party. There are plenty of emancipation movements that has been involved with Groenlinks since we exist, and before. And even better, few months before the integration document was written, a broad debate inside our party review our views on emancipation. Not surprisingly, the document on integration was called integration via emancipation. And we migrants inside groenlinks (or at least the organized migrants inside groenlinks) could not disagree more. The relation between integration and emancipation is not oone of cause and effect. As a foreigner, you could be well integrated in a society, and not be emancipated. Or you could be emancipated, and not integrated at all. It is possible to have a good job, a good house, speak the language of the country, pay taxes, participate in the society, then… and have a horrible partner that forces his decisions on you. Integrated and not emancipated. Or you could be perfectly emancipated, deciding your life style, enjoying a reasonably relation and so forth… and being isolated from the society without speaking the language, as many researchers in universities are, afte twenty years living in the Netherlands.

And this discussion is not only about the confusion between cause and effect. Biggest problem is that introducing the view that migrants need emancipation in order to be integrated… we are actually saying that migrants are subject to compassion, people that need rescue and help. Kind of funny. The right wing in Europe presents the migrants as dangerous. And we, part of the progressive wing, think of the migrants as pitiful.

I understand the temptation, of course. As lefties, we tend to focus in oppressed minorities, and we tend to try to do what we think is good for them. When the process goes fine, them minorities are an integral part of us political party, so we all actually go in the same direction. Now the automatic relation in between emancipation and integration, seems to me nothing else than that, an automatic left wing reaction. They are a minority, so they should have problems, and we will emancipate them! Even if it is surely better than the right wing reaction -they are foreigners, so they should be kept outside- it is my opinion that groenlinks still have much to mature in this issue, and produce new options and solutions, instead of left wing reactions.