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Eastern-European views on the Netherlands

23 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by in European Union, Hungary, Netherlands

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When I registered myself and moved to this country, it was a personal matter. But after I had lived in China for three years, I definitely felt it may be a lot better option than staying in Hungary. At the time, Hungary had a Socialist government whose prime minister admitted to lying all the time to their people, but he didn’t resign. After a few years, Hungary got into the grips of a leftist government who built up a two-thirds majority from 53% of the votes of 53% of the voting-age population, which they managed to strengthen with changes to the constituencies. Now they have a two-thirds majority with 44.8% of the votes of about 52% of voters (detailed results in Hungarian here).

Since then, the country has been receiving a lot of criticism from the EU and the US for actions and declarations from mostly the Prime Minister about building a non-liberal democracy. The government seems to have changed not only the constituencies to its advantage, but has changed almost all institutions of importance, like the central bank, the media, courts of justice, the national tax office and its supervising agency, has syphoned the billions of pension reserves of future pensioners and is replicating the action with the last remaining reserves of those who were not involved in the first round, has been driving public education and the health system almost into the ground with fully taking their administration into the (rather inexpert) hands of the government. Now, after a lot of negative experience with my original country, it’s time to take stock of where my choice of leaving Hungary has led me to, and whether a similar action of fellow Hungarians would be worth it.

Emigration has been escalating ever since former members of the Warsaw Pact have been admitted to the EU and the area of the Schengen Agreement. The main targets of movements have been Germany and the UK, but besides Austria, a lot of other Hungarians have moved to the Netherlands as well, so it’s important to look at the situation and chances in this country for East-Europeans.

Most of my friends here have pointed it out as a fact that circumstances in the Netherlands have been deteriorating for about 15 to 20 years. Younger people have been complaining about too many rules, but to my mind, they should look at Hungary with its ever-changing regulations for solace. The most important factor is then security. Regulations don’t keep changing, people are more-or-less reliable with a number of them to be certain to let you down without a word if you’re not chosen for a position, but life in general is just as secure here as anywhere in the developed world (or in China, for that matter). Institutions take care of you, most matters can be securely and quickly handled, or at least registered for handing, over the internet, there’s not much waiting time for almost anything. Systems work well, charges and prices are on a level which are not above reasonable limits.

Prices are nowadays just as high (of low, if you like) as in Hungary, except for housing prices. You have to be aware that by selling a property in Hungary, you get nowhere here, but renting is reasonable – while there’s a 1-to-5 ratio for buying a flat, renting one may not cost you a lot more than in Budapest. There is a system of help for poorer people too. You can get help for the compulsory and comparably very high rate of health security insurance, like for renting. However, you have to avoid a trap here. Possibilities are that you can get a part of your renting fees and health insurance fees covered by the government/national tax office.

However, they reckon you are a member of the family where you rent a room if your address is the same. All of this year, I’ve been demanded to repay the amount I was paid in 2011, and although I’ve pointed out that I, as a 56-year-old Hungarian man, didn’t marry a 64-year-old Dutchman a year after his wife had died of cancer, such things, as I’ve found out, do not matter: one is considered to be living together with another if the address is the same, and one hasn’t got access to a separate kitchen and bathroom. I did, still, my case is still pending and I can’t be sure I can avoid paying back nearly a thousand Euros I was given three years ago.

Thankfully, no such problems with health insurance, which is about 60% covered by the health subsidy if your earnings are low. Just be aware that insurance costs and the amount you have to pay before you get paid by the insurer (your own risk) keeps climbing, your subsidy decreases as you earn more, but all these are expected and not dramatic changes like in Hungary. If you have a profession, you may or may not get a job, circumstances depending. As you can get informed from my earlier posts here, a teacher with a foreign degree has next to no chance, except if he has a British degree. If you have good expertise and documents about it in a special area of industry, you can get a job for a year or two, but, like Polish people, you may come in for a lot of criticism and problems. Some leaders in industry may even directly cheat you.

The situation hasn’t been helped by a large number of Romanians who had come here to take up the support and then disappeared. I could have done that if I had moved back to Hungary one or two years after I had taken the support. As a large number of temporary workers come into the industrial sector from Poland, I have to add a few words about them too. A couple of years ago statistics indicated that they had already become the largest minority group in the Netherlands. As a result, the xenophobic, anti-Islam, anti-foreigner right-wing Freedom party made a lot of noise and came in for a lot of criticism after they tried to temper with the situation over the internet and over working rights. This weakened their position in the Parliament at the elections in 2012, so since then, politics has been looking relatively quiet here. As it is, Polish people do not stay in the country, rather, they help the industry a lot by offering cheap work that locals couldn’t or wouldn’t do, stay for a year in shacks and then take the remains of their wages back home. They aren’t a burden for the security system so they are a lot more useful than some of the other foreigners who stay, scarcely get work and live on subsidies.

On the streets, the huge variety of people you can see seems like a security against anti-foreigner sentiments, but while security is very good, crime rates are low, your bicycle may still be stolen or damaged, small miscalculations in the supermarket could happen and groups of youngsters may shout at you in the street on the way home from school. But when you get into trouble in the street, even young guys will help you instantly.

If one stays here for good, one has to live on something. If you have incomes not exceeding ten thousand Euros per year, you don’t have to register anywhere other than with the local government and get a bank account, then you get your social security number and can fill in your tax return on-line. To perform many kinds of economic activities, you have to ask for a “VAR”, which is a declaration to perform your activities as an individual normally under licenses asked of a company. Above that sum, you have to register yourself as a small company, or a “ZZP’er”, and with that you’re asked to register for VAT (“BTW” in Dutch). This VAT is only slightly less than in Hungary, it stands at 21% now, so don’t underestimate it. Business charges burdened on businesses here is not a real reason for anyone to escape the Hungarian system.

Accountability and help from the system is. If you have any questions, you can make an appointment with relevant institutions within a few days, and if they can’t answer you well enough (probably because your question is outside their competency), they will still refer you to information or organizations that can. If you don’t have high skills, or can’t use them, or just want to try something new on the job market, the most usual way to do it is walk into a temporary job agency, or “uitzendbureau”, and you may get a small job for minimum wages at a factory, store, or the post office centre. In such a case, all administration, security deductions etc. are done by the agency and you can do your tax return the following year copying stuff from their year-end declaration.

What you can’t avoid for long is payment for health security, which is high and rates keep crawling upwards. You can try to use the European Health Insurance Card, but it’s intended for travellers, not for people settled at an address within the EU, so you have to get insured by the compulsory local system. Sooner or later, you’ll be demanded to do so anyway as all systems are linked together. Even your bank has to declare your basic data to the tax system once a year, only the details are secret. But one can live with this small matter.

On the whole, the Netherlands, with all its cultural void compared to Hungary, with all its quiet and efficiency and relative coldness of the population, is a good choice for those who want to start again on a calculable basis.

by P.S.

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Interesting features of education – Part 1: volunteers and teaching material in the Netherlands

09 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by in language learning, language teaching

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I’ve discovered a number of outstanding features about language education in the Netherlands during the few years I’ve spent here. Perhaps the most special kind concerns teaching Dutch to foreigners, ‘Nederlandse taal voor andertaligens’, as it is called here.

It has been an important issue for the country because the Netherlands has been one of the few countries in Europe where the country has received a very sizable influx of foreigners for years. As a result, the Dutch comprise only 80% of the population, which means that teaching Dutch to fast growing numbers of immigrants has been big business and important for the country. My educated guess is that with a 1.76 fertility rate, the long-term and steady population growth of around 0.50% is to a large extent due to immigration.

Availability of Dutch course-books in libraries reflects this importance, but not that in book-shops. A couple of recent forays into local book-shops strengthened my earlier feelings that course-books in general are not publicly available. This holds true for any languages, be it Dutch, English, or German. It contrasts starkly with the availability of foreign language course material even in smaller towns in Hungary or at bigger places in China, and also with the availability of a very wide range of dictionaries that conforms to the colourful presence of so many ethnic groups in the country. The availability of Dutch course material in libraries indicates a healthy effort to supply for the needs of immigrants, but the lack of it in book-shops strikes one as strange. Even the rather muted efforts to widen the teaching of the native language in Hungary seems huge in comparison on this basis, not to mention the presence of Chinese courses available in China in spite of the weak state of teaching methodology. One seriously wonders how to get a picture about what students are taught from at school.

Insider opinion I’ve met recently holds that languages are taught using course material made in the Netherlands, not internationally. The same opinion also stated that choice usually depends on conservatism versus the over-valuation of the new. This would also support the conclusion I’ve drawn elsewhere and also from the fact that one can’t find Dutch participants at international events, that is, the profession is over-confident and isolated from international influences in language teaching. It also indicates that teaching languages is big business for Dutch professionals, though the quality may not always match international levels, which can be deducted from the price per quality ratio of the new series of books used by our regional MBO school for teaching Dutch, Code: the content is sometimes very strange, sometimes really modern with live video; the looks of the books reminds one of the quality of the Alexander-series of yore from Britain, or the quality of the first Hungarian course-books published in the late 1970’s; and the price is about four times that of international publications by Cambridge or Macmillan. If it is anything to go by about other languages, somebody does make big business out of teaching English, French and the other languages at school at the expense of those who need to buy their products in the absence of foreign competition.

Because ‘inburghering’, that is, helping immigrants learn the culture, administrative systems and everyday life as well as the language, is so important in the Netherlands, teaching is widely supported and delivered in a large number of various institutions and also by the population. One evidence is that schools are able to draw quite a number of volunteers, ‘vreiwilligers’ in Dutch, to help teachers with their work in class. This means that ordinary Dutch people with enough time feel it nice to come to classes and take part in group work making sure that good enough language is used by the groups. They are not teachers, but as natives, they can help the foreigners understand and use ordinary Dutch. Some of the volunteers also hold regular “office hours” in a separate place to help those in need of something extra after or before class, which takes the form of short one-to-one talks and discussions. I find both these kinds of help extremely useful and kind of the people involved.

But the most outstanding and unique feature takes us outside school. The system is called ‘taalmaatjes’, which means that a lot of Dutch people volunteer to regularly meet foreigners interested in the programme for a few hours a week and share their culture and language with them just for the sake of spending a few hours usefully and with communication with strange people. Such ‘language partners‘ also do this free of charge, for the joy and friendship in their free time. As this is also face-to-face, but regular as well, people get used to the foreigners’ needs, and can concentrate on them personally a lot more than teachers in class could. I can personally thank more to my taalmaatje now than to my teachers because my language partner is intelligent and can provide invaluable information on the one hand about collocations and idioms in the language, which are the most difficult to practice in class circumstances, and because, on the other hand, make it possible for me to speak intensively in supported circumstances for two hours. Such intensity and density of information about the language can’t be achieved in a normal Dutch class. Besides, the programme adds a lot to the understanding and the accommodation of newcomers in the country, so it is a basic ingredient to the much-needed mutual understanding and acceptance of differences among peoples.

With economic problems hitting this country too, schools in the Netherlands don’t have to see their budgets seriously cut, but, to my amazement, the ‘taalmaatje’ program was officially scraped in the middle of 2011. I find this very strange especially because the system only needed a small number of administrative people who have other tasks in their jobs as well, while the people involved in the actual work of helping learners, i.e. the ‘taalmaatjes’, didn’t get any remuneration. A proof of the success among Dutch people of the program is that a lot of those who were already participants at the time of the cuts have been keeping contact with their foreign friends ever since. This was and still is, through its intensity, perhaps the most effective way of language teaching coupled with tolerance and cultural understanding, while it costs next to nothing.

A great pity the government doesn’t support the program, but perhaps it is in connection with a kind of turning away from the long-term trend of welcoming foreigners in the country. Financial support to help immigrants learn Dutch has also been scraped on the whole, which is very likely to represent an emerging trend among the population against easy integration and further welcoming of immigrants. This trend was represented, for example, by one parliamentary party’s web-site earlier this year against Polish workers in the country.

To let you better understand the impact of such moves on a small country like the Netherlands or Hungary and the like, I’d like to give you a personal example. I’ve known a very nice young man from Iraq for years, who came here, and received refugee status and financial aid to live here and follow his studies at one of the best Dutch universities. His specialization is in microbiology, and after receiving his MSc mostly in English, he’s now pursuing his PhD studies in Dutch. Had he not received any financial help and language support over the years, he wouldn’t be able to do this, he would have left for Great Britain, for example. He may not stay very long after graduation because his field is very specific and this country is too small to support further researchers and research in it. It is far more likely that he’ll be able to get a research job in one of the English-speaking countries. By extension, we can safely say that any people with talent coming here would not stay here without language help, would not be able to utilize their talent to its full potential and wouldn’t make it possible for the Dutch economy to invest more in, and benefit more from, R&D on a scale comparable to the potentials of larger economies speaking the largest world language. The Netherlands can’t really become larger, but is still attractive to foreign talent, but only if the language barrier is surmountable in the first place. As R&D is the real measure of economic growth potential, and its source, besides capital, is the brains and intellect of the country’s inhabitants, talent shouldn’t be lost at the very first hurdle, on the language front, in any small country.

by P.S.

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