The Big Picture (Assignment #3)
[Blogger's note: I let the momentum get the best of me with this one and accidentally wrote a long post. I apologize for this. To give your eyes and brain a break from my ramblings, I have dispersed some Paris photos in between paragraphs.]
The “group” aspect of this assignment suffers slightly due to my travels abroad. Sabra, Derek and I met outside the Burke Museum one particularly sunny Monday last week, though our meeting was brief. I was set to take off for Paris the next day and needed a ride home from my dad in order to pack. The timing never quite worked for everyone.
Undeterred, it is on this side of the pond that I must form my project. My research questions (posted below) will differ from Derek and Sabra’s in that they will have a broader, more euro-centric scope. My initial thoughts concerned immigrants, their conditions, and their effects on Dutch society. The ball does not have to stop rolling there, however, and thus I can bring more ideas into this fold.
Sunrise on my street
I have heard repeatedly that the Dutch are the world’s best political negotiators and policy amenders. Since intraregional focus shifted in earnest to immigration issues (namely, Arab or Arabized émigrés) in the last couple decades, and since Amsterdam, like many European metropolises, harbors a large immigrant population, it stands to reason that a lot of the Netherlands’ vaunted policy should be directed towards immigration. I want to investigate these nuances of Dutch policy. To augment my findings, I will draw upon my experiences in Berlin and Paris–and their respective Turkish and African denizens. If the Dutch policymakers truly are Europe’s finest, I should be able to see in-print evidence of their work. (One obvious point to argue is that the International Crime Tribunal is located in The Hague. This is not by coincidence.) Implementation of said immigration policy should manifest itself in the ghettos as well as the more traditional and heterogenous neighborhoods; and with that, I can assay the conditions of the immigrants. This begs questions. Are they mistreated? Are there hazards of immigrants’ circumstances that are universal and therefore simply unfixable?
Is there proper incentive to integrate and assimilate into Dutch society? Or, on the contrary, is there pressure to cloister certain populations (i.e. a Congolese ghetto or a Filipino district) to keep them from mixing with the rest of the population? The crux of my project is the analysis of how municipal and national immigration policy plays out for the population, and then I will compare it to other major cities.
I am glad that I have the opportunity to live in Paris as these ideas and plans begin to crystalize. As you certainly don’t need to be reminded, reading about a situation is completely different than living in it. And so, in this way, my distance from Seattle and the other group members gives me a distinct advantage as I hitch my horse to a research post. I am looking forward to wandering through peripheral Parisian neighborhoods, to where North and West Africans congregate and live. My aim with these little jaunts around the city is to investigate and document the demographics, cultural overtones, and livelihoods of immigrants.
To satisfy the exploration aspect of this assignment, I needed only to wander around the block. My apartment is situated in the immigrant-laden, ethnic-friendly 13ème arrondissement, in the Southeast corner of Paris proper. I live within a stone’s throw of Lebanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, African, and traditional French restaurants and shops, as well as a small community center for Senegalese travelers or recent immigrants (which is closed indefinitely for some reason). One walks down the street and sees ten non-white people for every de Gaulle doppelgänger. As per expectation, most of Paris’ immigrants hail from former colony states, like Vietnam and Lebanon and Africa, but there are others mixed in. For the most part, the groups seem to have assimilated smoothly and evenly; no particular minority group in the arrondissement dominates the others. There is one detail, though, which points to the fact that these groups may have acculturated but not amalgamated. By this I mean to say that I have not seen any instance of minority groups commingling. I haven’t seen a single person of Asian descent give a second look at the the Lebanese restaurant, nor have I seen an African go for some pizza. Even the mini soccer games in the nearby park are divided by ethnicity. The minority groups stick with each other, which leaves the white folks as the only wayfarers between groups. I am very interested to see if this trend is prevalent in the other parts of Paris, and in Amsterdam, and throughout Europe. This notion is important because the cultural demarcation of ethnic groups usually fosters anti-national or anti-assimilation sentiments on both sides, and as Europe has experienced in past few years, breeds foreign-affinity terrorism, among other problems. (I digress…)
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Without further fodder, here are my initial research questions:
- Are the conditions of immigrant lifestyles in Amsterdam substantially different than those of other major European cities? If so, what factors contribute to the better or worse conditions, and what is the government’s involvement? Finally, if conditions are better in Amsterdam (as I expect), what policies or implementing techniques are transferrable to the U.S. and other European states?
- Does a maligned history with religious intolerance hamper immigrants’ capability and desire to integrate into their new society? Basically, is the old Christian-Muslim/West-East feud the main factor in Europe’s immigration issues? And what, then, do government and cultural leaders do to affect theological stigmas and prejudices?
- Why are the Dutch known to be the best negotiators and policymakers? What in their history bred a nation of levelheaded wordsmiths and champions of rhetoric? Is there something in the cakes at the coffee shops? (Don’t answer that.) And are there lessons that we American students can take from the Dutch in our pursuit to form a more perfect union?
Jardin de Luxembourg
Again, sorry for the wordy post. ‘Til next time,
John O.
