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Polder en emigratie.: Het Nederlandse emigratiebestel in internationaal perspectief 1945-1967
Abstract
In Polder en emigratie the emigration policy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is analysed as a key component of the social and economic political landscape of the Netherlands between 1945 and 1967. The book shines a spotlight on the way in which various key players from government circles as well as mainstream society join forces after 1945 in order to shape emigration policy. This is set against the backdrop of the fledgling welfare state of the Netherlands and placed within the wider context of international relations. Polder en emigratie sheds new light on the constitutional debates on the origins of governance in the Netherlands and on the participation of women and minority groups in a system that bore a striking resemblance to public sector bodies with a legal mandate, but which was also dominated by organisations from the farming sector. Focusing on the international context made it possible to make links with the establishment of development cooperation as well as immigration policy in the Netherlands.
Translated title of the contribution Polder and Emigration : Dutch emigration governance in an international perspective 1945-1967
... This phenomenon has been known under the term 'language attrition' (Schmid and Köpke, 2007). In the particular case of Dutch, this kind of research on language loss or language attrition has concentrated itself on the streams of Dutch emigrants who in the twentieth century moved to countries like the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Brazil (van Faassen, 2014b(van Faassen, , 2014a. A constant element in this research is the finding that on entering their new country, these immigrants almost invariably set aside their native language and concentrated their efforts on acquiring the new language. ...
... Over the years, a considerable number of studies have been conducted on the preservation or loss of the Dutch language, culture and identity among Dutch and Flemish emigrants in the 20th century (Berns and van Marle, 2000;Gorter and van der Zee, 2002;Klatter-Folmer and Kroon, 1997;Polinsky, 2018;van der Sijs, 2014). Most of these studies focused on the traditional overseas emigration countries: the United States (Daan, 1987;Smits, 1996;Smits and van Marle, 2013;van der Sijs, 2009;van Marle and Smits, 2000;Webber, 1988), Australia (Clyne and Pauwels, 2013;Rowland, 2006;Schrover and Van Faassen, 2010), Canada (Keijzer, 2007;van den Hoonaard, 1991) and Brazil (Buysse, 1984;Polinsky, 2018;Roos and Eshuis, 2008;Schaffel Bremenkamp et al., 2017). ...
... Furthermore, in the 21 st century, emigration is often temporary rather than permanent, expats wander from one country to another and most emigration occurs within Europe and no longer to the traditional overseas immigration countries (van Faassen, 2014b(van Faassen, , 2014a. ...
Two studies are presented that investigated whether and to what extent emigration affects the knowledge of idiomatic expressions in the native language. Data on Dutch emigrant idiom knowledge were compared to data on idiom knowledge from two groups of Dutch non-emigrants differing in age. Research questions addressed a) possible differences in idiom knowledge between emigrants and non-emigrants, b) the effect of idiom properties such as familiarity and transparency on idiom knowledge in emigrants and non-emigrants and c) the effect of participant characteristics such as emigration length, use of Dutch, and age on idiom knowledge. The results show that a) when possible effects of age are minimized, only a small difference in idiom knowledge emerges between emigrants and non-emigrants; b) familiarity and transparency positively affect idiom knowledge in both groups and c) idiom knowledge of older non-emigrants is better than that of younger non-emigrants, while for emigrants a facilitatory effect of age is absent. We argue that this effect might have been obscured by that of emigration length, which has a negative effect on idiom knowledge. We discuss the results with respect to those of previous studies and suggest possible avenues for future research.
... This seems in line with the fact that the province of Zeeland is absent and the Northern provinces of Groningen, Friesland and Drenthe are underrepresented in the sample the map is based on. However, as emigration was meant to be complementary to the industrialization policies (Faassen, 2014a), this also calls for further research, because it seems likely that there also was a relation with post-war changes in the industrial situation of the Netherlands and the closing of the Limburg coal mines in the early 1960s. The effects of the different migrant schemes are much more subtle. ...
... Return migration was always sizable, but the contemporary files in the archives were marked secret as return was seen as failed migration, a label that still dominates historiography. To take away reasons to return, the Dutch authorities invested in social officers that resided at the Dutch consulates in Australia, partly in response to bottom-up pressure from the civil society organizations, who had the majority in the Dutch emigration governance system [ (Faassen, 2014a), Ch. 2]. They supported the emigrants by intervening in their affairs, providing assistance in all sorts of social matters. ...
Digitization and digital methods have had a big impact on migration history and history in general. The dispersed and fragmented nature of migration heritage that involves at least two countries and many cultural heritage institutions make it clear that migration history can be much improved by using digital means to connect collections. This makes it possible to overcome the biases that policy have introduced in private and public collections alike by selection and perspective. Digital methods are not immune to these biases and may even introduce new distortions because they often change heritage contextualizations. In this article, Van Faassen and Hoekstra argue that therefore they should be embedded in source criticism methodology. They use the example of post-world War II Dutch-Australian emigration to show how a migrant registration system can be used as a structural device to connect migrant heritage. They use methods from computer vision to assess the information distribution of the registration system. Together, connecting collections and information assessments give an encompassing view of the migrant visibility and invisibility in the heritage collections and perspectives for scholars to become aware of heritage biases.
... He said that notwithstanding the high Dutch population density the country had 'hitherto succeeded in maintaining sufficient employment rates ... but that task [would] be made easier when part of the population ... [would] dare to seek its future in larger areas [of the world].' 1 This speech expressed the feelings in both Dutch government and bureaucracy that got its expression in the organization and stimulation of emigration in the years to come. It also coincided with the outcome of polls of a year before, in which one third of the Dutch population expressed its wish to emigrate if this would be possible (Van Faassen 2014). With countries like Australia and Canada migration treaties or informal agreements were drafted about quota and subsidizing. ...
... There is a wealth of studies on the first years after arrival especially from the migrant perspective, when emigrants were housed in camps (or, formally, reception centers) like Bonegilla, Scheyville, Wacol etc. or hostels and families were separated from the moment the man had to start working, for instance to fulfill the NAMA-scheme requirements (Peters, 2001, Ch.4, Walcker-Birkhead, 1988Eysbertse 1997) In contrast with the graph on finance, the housing graph doesn't show specific patterns that prompt analysis. In general, it follows the pattern of the departure peaks and tops, which is rather obvious. ...
In this paper we discuss the extension of established methodology with computer vision to make it possible to almost literally see into the blind spots that using established methods on large serial collections only leave. We argue that this method overcomes the dangers of implicit selection that are commonly designated as ‘cherry picking’, or selecting the ‘most important’ files. Furthermore, in using combined traditional and DH-methodology it becomes visible what is and what is not in the collection as a whole. As such it is a a replacement for traditional leafing through an archive. As a method of source criticism, this gives many more possibilities than would have been possible with established methodologies only. We illustrate our findings on our project Migrant, Mobilities and Connection on Dutch-Australian emigration 1950-1992.
The main research question in the project is which factors determined the whole migration experience and what the relation was between policy, civil society and individual agency. Australia was, together with Canada, the main destination of Dutch emigrants after 1945, receiving around 160,000 migrants from 1950 to 1992.
The point of departure is a registration system that was kept by the Dutch migration authorities, based at the Dutch consulates. It consists of 50,000 cards (100,000 images scanned) and contains data about the interactions between migrants and the migration officers from 1950-1992. The cards themselves contain a wealth of information that is not readily available as the writing on the cards is a mixed of manuscript and typescript that are distributed unequally over the cards.
Before starting to answer the main question we had to determine first how to study Dutch-Australian emigrants with this extensive registration system that is hermetic by its size and composition. Traditionally, historians would tackle a collection like this by taking a sample from the cards and additionally study the most interesting cases.
However, case selection is difficult as it is impossible to read a hundred thousand images or even leaf through them. Moreover, it is not clear how cases fit into the registration system and whether there are hidden features of the system influencing the size of files.
Thus, a combination of a large archive collection of mostly undifferentiated material and methodologies not devised for distant reading, leads to blind spots for the historian and asks for additional methods to inspect the whole collection. The computer vision method we adopted measured the amount of writing on the cards. Viewed over the whole registration system, this gives a distribution of the information over the cards.Combining this with traditional sampling we were able to identify distinguishable groups of migrants (eg. by as religion, marital status or age).
In the paper we will elaborate on the (non-)possibilities of relating these groups to the ‘information distribution’ as a whole and on the (non-)possibilities of distinguishing changes in policies and executive strategies of the Dutch migration authorities by using this combined methods.
... When we analyse the development in the discourse from the 1980s onwards and compare it with wordclouds from a 3 rd data set (consisting of IOM policy documents), this seems only 23 Brückweh 2012, 4. 24 See Van Faassen 2014, 20-24. 25 Foucault Lectures 1977-1978, 2007Andrijasevic & Walters 2010, 977-999;Walters 2011, 140-143. ...
... Cf.Van Faassen 2014, 375-379, 2017 ...
... In the years immediately after World War II, the government actively pushed for emigration, fearing overpopulation (Lucassen & Lucassen, 2018 pp. 94-96;van Faassen, 2014). At the same time, classical immigration countries outside Europe were still very open to immigrants from Europe (Henkes, 2013;Hulsman, 2012). ...
In this report, the CPB explores the influence of economic policy and the business cycle on migration in the Netherlands, over a period of over seventy years. It shows that when the economy is strong, more migrants tend to arrive in the Netherlands, while during recessions, immigration decreases, and emigration increases. However, asylum migration does not show a similar relation with the business cycle. Additionally, since the 2004 EU enlargement, there has been a notable rise in immigration, primarily driven by labour and related family migration.
... The combined Dutch-Australian resource allows important new questions to be asked and explored, such as which institutions were involved, and what their influences were on the lives of the emigrants during their time in the Netherlands and then after their immigration to Australia. The institutions include not only the Dutch and Australian governments but also the church, employers, trade unions, and other civil society organizations (Peters 2000;van Faassen 2014a). It becomes possible to answer questions as to whether specific aspects of the cultural background of the people, such as original home locality or religion, contributed to the lives they led in their new country. ...
Migrants all over the world have left multiple traces in different countries, and this cultural heritage is of growing interest to researchers and to the migrant communities themselves. Cultural heritage institutions, however, have dwindling funds and resources to meet the demand for the heritage of immigrant communities to be protected. In this article we propose that the key to bridging this gap is to be found in new possibilities that are opened up if resources are linked to enable digital exploration of archival records and collections. In particular, we focus on the value of building a composite and distributed resource around migrants’ life courses. If this approach is used and dispersed collections held by heritage institutions can be linked, migrant communities can have access to detailed information about their families and researchers to a wealth of data—serial and qualitative—for sophisticated and innovative research. Not only does the scattered data become more usable and manageable, it becomes more visible and coherent; patterns can be discovered that were not apparent before. We use the Dutch-Australian collaborative project “Migrant: Mobilities and Connection” as an example and case study of this life course–centered methodology and propose that this may develop into a migration heritage template for migrants worldwide.
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