The parliament starts Monday a debate on Verdonk’s controversial plans

THE HAGUE, December 13 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - The Netherlands is mulling plans on compulsory courses for immigrants who have already been living in the country for years.

Dutch Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk was facing a heated discussion of her new plans in parliament on Monday, December 12, though a decision is not expected for several weeks, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The Netherlands already makes integration classes mandatory for newcomers as laws have been changed to oblige all new immigrants and accepted asylum seekers to take classes in Dutch language and culture.

The new plans would make everyone who has not spent eight years in the Netherlands during the period of compulsory education (from six to the age of 16) take integration classes.

This will apply to some 750,000 people, some of them Dutch nationals who lived abroad in their youth, some of immigrant descent.

Several groups are exempt from the policies such as people who have certain professional certificates, EU citizens or migrants who have already been integrated in other EU countries.

In practice the compulsory integration classes will focus on people who live off social benefits, women who are jobless or receive benefits and foreign religious workers such as Muslim imams.

European Lead

The Netherlands will become the first European country to make integration courses compulsory for the aforesaid immigrants if Verdonk’s plans were adopted by the parliament.

“In several Scandinavian countries there are courses for immigrants who have been in the country for a long time already but the compulsory element in the Netherlands is a first, I believe,” Maud Bredero of the Dutch ministry of justice said.

Integrating immigrants has been the subject of much debate in the  Netherlands since the emergence of right-wing politicians such as the late Pim Fortuyn.

Only two years ago, public debate on the problems of integration was still taboo until the populist Fortuyn burst onto the political scene with his bold proclamation, “enough is enough”.

Fortuyn was a vocal critic of the Dutch policy of encouraging a multi-cultural society and advocated that everybody who lived in the  Netherlands should be able to speak Dutch.

After his meteoric rise in politics that ended when he was shot dead in June 2002 just ahead of the elections, many traditional political parties toughened their stance on immigration to lure back discontented voters.

More recently the debate got another impulse when tension between ethnic groups flared after the outspoken and provocative filmmaker Theo van Gogh was killed by a suspected Dutchman of Moroccan descent.

A series of Muslim sites and mosques have come under racist attacks in the wake of Van Gogh’s murder.

The Arab European League (AEL), a rights group that has offices in  Belgium and the Netherlands, expressed last month concerns about the eruption of a new wave of Islamophobia and xenophobia in both countries.

“Islamophobia is also a form of anti-Semitism and on that level it is now clear that some European countries didn’t learn their lesson of history,” it had said in a statement on its Web site.

Addressing the opening session of “Confronting Islamophobia: Education for Tolerance and Understanding”, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan regretted that “Islam's tenets are frequently distorted and taken out of context.”