Negroid immigration in Holland: Antilleans and Somalis compared

Until the 1970s there was no significant Negro presence in Holland. In the 1970s the first wave came from Surinam, in the 1980s the second wave from the Antilles and in the 1990s the third wave from Somalia. Since elites in the media and academic world never tire of saying that mass immigration is beneficial to the receiving country, it is good to put this thesis to the test using publicly available government sources and applying it to Negro migration. As the government uses regions of origin instead of ethnicity, we leave Surinamese out, because this group is composed of Whites, Blacks and Hindus. It is more interesting to use Antilleans and Somalis, because they are ethnically pure groups and they are both Negroid. These groups are particularly interesting because the Antilleans are descendants of African slaves under the White colonial regime. It will come as no surprise that it is common in the media and among intellectuals to claim that the reason for the backwardness of the Antilleans is that they were enslaved by Whites.  On the other hand, this argument fails to apply to the Somalis because they were not brought as slaves from Africa.

Plans, numbers and problems

In 2010 the research centre of Erasmus University of Rotterdam produced a report at the request of the Dutch government on the effects of public investment on the empowerment of Antillean communities between 2005 and 2008. A total of 44 million Euros were spent, more than was spent on any other minority group with problems, even though the Antillean community is relatively small (141,000 in 2011). The local projects did not yield any positive results, and in some cases the situation was even worse than before government intervention. The main problems are broken families, school dropout, unemployment, and criminality. Half of the Antilleans grow up with one parent (usually the mother) according to the Yearly Report on Integration of 2009 (p. 14). The school drop-out rate among Antilleans is almost half (p. 9). The crime rate is 6 times higher among Antilleans than among the native Dutch (page 10). One of the consequences is that in 2008 there were 14 times more Antilleans in jail than native Dutch if the figures are corrected to reflect their ratio of the population. The overrepresentation of the Antilleans in jail compared to their crime rate is mainly the result of the brutal violence that is a hallmark of Antillean criminals.

Somalis don’t fare any better than their Black brethren from the Caribbean. The prospect of Somalis in Holland is so bleak that the integration report mentioned above tells us that the only bright spot is that there are not so many of them (!!). (There were approximately 22,000 in 2009.) An astonishing 58% grow up with only one parent (p. 14). The school drop-out rate is so high that only 23% have a diploma of secondary education—a major factor in the high Somali unemployment rate. Forty percent of Somali males aged 15–64 have no job and as a result they are registered as recipients of social welfare. The heavy reliance of broken families on social welfare is illustrated by the fact that 46% of Somali women rely on welfare. Somalis are also not entrepreneurs, unlike the overseas Chinese, 13.4% of whom are entrepreneurs. The Somali rate of entrepreneurship (0.8%) is 9 times lower than that of native Dutch. According to the 2011 report Somalis in Holland, more than half of the Somalis (58%) have no education beyond primary level, which in effect means no education at all (p. 25).

Behavior, criminality and IQ

There has been a lot of investigation into the root causes of the failure of Negroid communities to achieve economic success. Some relate criminality to culture, religion or social-economic deprivation. Only lately there have been some reports in the media about the connection between intelligence and criminality. The daily newspaper Sp!ts of 14 January 2011 reported an investigation of the Dutch psychiatrist David Vinkers, a member of the Dutch Institute for Forensic Psychiatry, who investigated no less than 249 cases of Antillean criminality and requested an IQ test for all criminals. The outcome was that more than half had an IQ of less than 85, indicating that their average IQ is below that of American Blacks and implying that a substantial percentage are in the retarded range for Whites (i.e., IQ < 70). (In Holland, an IQ between 70 and 85 is considered mildly retarded and such people are eligible for government healthcare benefits [see here, p. 4).) A glance at the world map with the average IQ per country indicates that this level of IQ is normal in among Blacks in the Caribbean, with average IQ’s ranging between 80 and 85, but significantly lower for Haiti, presumably because Haitians have relatively little admixture with Whites. Vinkers has written an article in the Dutch Journal of Psychiatry in which he points out that in Holland more Antilleans are considered incompetent when facing charges of crime because of mental retardation than in the Antilles.

This story of applying different levels for retardation because of significant difference in IQ reminds me of an anecdote of a Somali man who was prevented from being repatriated to Somalia because he was considered retarded and therefore incompetent to go back by himself. The Somali in question, Fahdi Hassan Mohamed (24 years old in 2010), had an IQ of 74, in the mildly mentally retarded range according to Dutch standards. However, in Somalia with its average IQ of 68, this man would be considered above average.

The irony is that although Somalis were not enslaved in contemporary history, they have a lower average IQ than the enslaved Antilleans—thereby demolishing the slavery-causes-low-IQ argument. The groups are far more similar than different: both groups show the same Negroid culture of absent fathers, contempt for education, and a preference of criminality and idleness over work. They are neither willing nor able to make a contribution for the common welfare of Western countries. This should be a warning for advocates of Sub-Saharan (and Caribbean) immigration in America and Europe.