welfare tricksters
A right-wing conspiracy theory brings down the Dutch government, Poland bans abortion, and MAGA insurrection updates
Welcome to Opportunists, Charlatans and… the newsletter where I look at the shenanigans of right-wing movements and the connections between them.
This time I’ll be looking at what has just happened to cause the collapse of the Dutch ruling coalition headed by PM Mark Rutte (pictured above) and how it is related to a pernicious (and untrue) right-wing conspiracy theory about foreigners and tax fraud.
Below that, a round-up of the latest on Poland, the MAGA insurrection fallout, and more.
Turn off the taps
Last week the entire Dutch government, led by Mark Rutte of centre-right People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), took the unusual step of resigning on mass in the wake of a scandal related to child benefits.
As explained in The Guardian:
As many as 26,000 parents were wrongly accused by the Dutch tax authorities of fraudulently claiming child allowance over several years from 2012, with as many as 10,000 families forced to repay tens of thousands of euros, in some cases leading to unemployment, bankruptcies and divorces.
The tax authority admitted last year that at least 11,000 were singled out for special scrutiny because of their ethnic origin or dual nationality, fuelling longstanding allegations of systemic racism in the Netherlands.
A lawyer for some of the victims clarified that his clients ended up in this situation “as a result of ethnic profiling by bureaucrats who picked out their foreign-looking names.”
This is an interesting detail given that due to the Netherlands’ expansive colonial history stretching from East Asia to Africa to South America, there have been all manner of names residing in the country for centuries. (Another example of the European phenomenon of being a #PermanentMigrant).
With Dutch general elections coming up in March, it is not expected that the government’s resignation will lead to the permanent downfall of Rutte or a major shake-up in the fates of the parties, given the fact that the ministers responsible have resigned and many view the government as having taken accountability for their mistakes. So I’ll revisit possible election repercussions then.
But what I do want to point out now, is that this long-brewing scandal stems from one of the key right-wing conspiracy theories in Europe of the early 2000s, one that has had a major impact on Western European democracies from Germany to the United Kingdom and now, has brought down the Dutch government. It shows what happens when a known lie has more political and financial advantages than the truth, for those who are willing to repeat it.
How the myth of Welfare Tourism made the rounds
“Every fraud case undermines solidarity and support for social security, and harms the hard-working Dutch, who have to pay unnecessarily higher taxes and social security contributions.” (Dutch MP Malik Azmani (VVD) 2012)
Who tricks, will be thrown out. (German conservative party CSU slogan, 2013)
"We must be completely mad, as a country, to be giving people from Eastern Europe in-work benefits.” (British MP Nigel Farage (UKIP) 2014)
Bulgaria and Romania joined the European Union in 2007. However, their citizens didn’t have full access to one of the key EU “four freedoms” - freedom of movement- until 2014, when the last restrictions on this freedom were finally removed for the new members. Over a similar period (2009 onwards), making gestures towards Southeast expansion, the EU offered visa-free travel to citizens of countries of the Western Balkans, namely Serbia, North Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).
Two results of these developments were that:
People from Bulgaria and Romania migrated more freely around Europe for work, as they were now allowed to do,
People from the Western Balkans traveled to Western Europe visa-free, as they were also now allowed to do.
But there was a natural consequence of both. Namely, that people who moved to work in Western European social democracies also wished to take advantage of their social welfare policies, like anyone else living there and paying taxes, and received child support, unemployment funds, etc, when applicable. At the same time, some of those people who traveled from the Western Balkans to Western Europe under the visa-free regime decided to apply for asylum to remain. Again, both of these things were perfectly legal.
But, as often happens when people who are historically discriminated against try to access basic social rights others take for granted, there arose almost immediately an insinuation that both using social welfare policies and accessing the 60-year-old refugee convention, when done by people from South/Eastern Europe, was illegal or some kind of dirty trick.
This insinuation was very much rooted in historical discrimination against people of Slavic extraction as well as against Europe’s Roma minority. In a neat trick recognized from the kind of racism seen against Black people and People of Color worldwide, people who have been historically subjugated and criminalized are said by the Right to be naturally inclined towards poverty and crime, and posed as a danger to the very population who has been victimizing them.
Negative and damaging stereotypes about South/Eastern Europeans have deep roots in Europe, as Ibram X. Kendi points out in his book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,
[Before the height of the African slave trade] most of the captives sold in Western Europe were Eastern Europeans who had been seized by Turkish raiders from areas around the Black Sea. So many of the seized captives were “Slavs” that the ethnic term became the root word for “slave” in most Western European languages.”
Centuries later, we have a situation where numerous far-right parties emerged during the immediate aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis (which pitted poorer EU countries against wealthy ones in a failed test of the common economic area) to sell fear of hordes of South/ Eastern Europeans migrating to Western Europe to steal their riches without working- quite the inverse of the historical fact, as well as the inverse of what was actually happening.
Indeed, while this myth was propagated by the media and especially by parties like the UK Independence Party (UKIP), Alternative for Germany (AFD) and the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV), South/Eastern Europeans were migrating, but mostly to work in highly-skilled and seasonal jobs. In general, people move to other EU countries to work, often at a higher rate of employment than local populations. In this case, imported labor was often exploited and employers required South/Eastern Europeans to accept sub-par or independent contractor work contracts, pushing them into precarity and actually depriving them of benefits, particularly in the farming, textile, and construction sector. In other jobs in the UK and elsewhere, South/Eastern Europeans have worked under conditions described as “modern slavery.”
Overall, EU migration was a net benefit to social welfare states, not a drain, with EU migrant households on average contributing more to the public purse than the average citizen, as this 2019 study of 29 countries concludes.
This means that EU migration represents a fiscal asset rather than a liability for the main host countries for EU migrants. In effect, restricting the free movement of workers would, if anything, imply a considerable cost for the public purse of these countries. (Marcus Österman)
Nevertheless, the idea that South/Eastern Europeans were making “a profession” out of traveling to Western European countries and the UK to access social welfare benefits became pervasive enough to engender its own lexicon of terms, words like “benefits tourism”, “Armutsmigration” (poverty migration), “Sozialhilfebetrüger” (welfare-trickster) and “belastings fradeur” (Dutch for tax fraudster). News talk shows across Europe talked excitedly about busloads of migrants traveling the West to sign up for welfare benefits, only to immediately return to their home countries and cash in.
Now, as someone who has previously attempted to access welfare in Germany as a foreigner, I would like to explain to you, dear reader, that the level of expertise and documentation needed exceeded my skills (and I went to law school.) The idea that someone could arrive in countries like Germany and the Netherlands and not only master social welfare policy in a foreign language but also outsmart extremely canny government employees and trick them was an idea that always seemed suspect in my view. But that did not make this idea any less attractive to both center-right and far-right parties, who used underlying prejudices to push for real reforms that restricted access to benefits for both foreigners and citizens and fit in with their existing goals of transferring money from the public to private interests.
UKIP pledged to make new EU migrants wait five years before accessing any British benefits (ultimately, Brexit Britain has gone much further and ended freedom of movement altogether.) Germany passed rules saying that EU migrants can have their benefits denied if they do not appear to be seeking employment (as tested in the so-called Dano case, involving a young Romanian woman.) And the Netherlands, under the first term of Mark Rutte, embraced a “zero-tolerance policy” for welfare fraud, a policy that led tax agency officials to wrongfully consider thousands of Dutch benefits recipients fraudsters apparently on the basis of having a “foreign-sounding last name.”
(Interestingly, this new passion for rooting out minor financial fraud did not lead to heightened scrutiny for large-scale corporate tax evasion, as the journalist-exposed #LuxLeaks, #CumEx and #ParadisePapers scandals have shown.)
As these new restrictive policies came into play, a new group of immigrants came on the scene from Syria, North Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, allowing right-wing narratives about poor invaders seeking to exploit generous Western democracies to merge with their other favorite hobby horse, anti-Muslim racism. The hostility towards South/East Europeans became a roadmap for the tactics used to vilify immigrants from majority Muslim countries, both to gain political power and justify slashes to social spending that hurt newcomers and locals alike.
A lot like the myth of voter fraud in the United States, the veracity of the underlying claims about trickery and fraud by foreigners and People of Color are unimportant as long as they offer the right-wing a chance to promote policies that limit access to rights- in the US, watering down the right to vote, and in Europe, making access to social benefits suspect for whoever is the enemy of the day, be it South/Eastern Europeans, Roma, North Africans or Syrians.
In both cases, we have to relentlessly attack the original lie - that a theoretical vulnerability of inclusive systems for civil, political and social rights is proof of large-scale fraud by historically oppressed minorities - if we want the policies stacked on top of it to change.
Lightening Strajks
Poland’s dreadful PiS finally moved forward with the near-total abortion ban they had been threatening for years. This policy puts the organized feminist opposition into the tricky position of holding mass protests during the second wave of a deadly pandemic and is already having devastating consequences for public health. Nevertheless, protests have already taken place in 51 cities in Poland, with more promised. Stay tuned.
Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro is using a dictatorship-era law to crack down on dissent against his failed COVID-19 response, targetting opinion journalists and even a Supreme Court Justice. #EleNão
The fall-out from the January 6th MAGA Insurrection on Capitol Hill continues, with new information about right-wing police infiltration, shady funding, and coordination with members of congress breaking every day. Over at our anti-fascist radio show Like It Is, co-host Diana Arce and I did several deep dives explaining the issues at stake, including episodes on the police, impeachment, the big tech response and more. Two of the episodes are free to listen to on Patreon, the others can be accessed at any donation level. Listen here: https://www.patreon.com/likeitis
Further reading:
Dutch PM Rutte and his government quit over child welfare scandal - Al Jazeera
Netherlands: Kafkaesque, racist persecution of welfare recipients pushes government over the brink - The Left Berlin
Balkan Migrants – Social Problem or Straw Man for Germany? - (me for) Balkan Insight
Exploding the myth of Polish plumbers - Politico
Myth busted: EU migrants no extra burden on taxpayers in more generous welfare states - The Conversation
Adults in the Room- Yannis Varoufakis