The best way to see Amsterdam is through the eyes of an exile

Guido Snel

In the middle of what has come to be known as the ‘refugee crisis’ in the summer and autumn of 2015, a seemingly simple twist took place in the public discourse over the figure of the refugee as a result of one photo – a boy washed up on a beach. Until that point, the response to the eternal ambivalence towards the ‘newcomer’, the ‘migrant’, the ‘immigrant’ – what Georg Simmel suggestively characterised around 1900 as ‘the one who comes today and stays tomorrow’ – had degenerated into blunt rejection. Those who risked their lives on the Mediterranean Sea in order to reach the EU – preferably Germany or the United Kingdom – were at best economic refugees but in most cases simply fortune-hunters. But now national TV evenings for the refugees are organised and the entire nation sympathises with the train of refugees, as it did before with the starving people in Ethiopia or in other misery-ridden countries.

Traditionally, the counterargument to xenophobia is that migrants are good for society, that they expand the ways of life of a city or a country, that a wider variety of food becomes available in supermarkets, that we would all be less inward-looking and become more cosmopolitan. It is an argument that has proven to be vulnerable since 11 September 2001 and the ensuing debate on Islam. Not all residents of Amsterdam believe they have thrived as a result of the globalisation that has transformed the city since the 1990s into one of the cultural and business centres of Europe. In a certain sense, Amsterdam is indeed a segregated city. Districts and schools are monochrome (sometimes ethnically, always socially) and there is no equal opportunity for everyone, whatever politics claims. The University of Amsterdam also engages in segregation. The Faculty of Humanities attracts the vast majority of its students from that part of the population that does not have its origins in the waves of immigration of the 20th century. The great migration to Western Europe – which began some fifty years ago with the wave of labour migrants and that was preceded and later intensified by post-colonial migrants – can be considered the most significant social development of the last half century in our part of the continent and demonstrates that the university is no longer firmly rooted in society.