Guest worker, immigrant or minority; it continues to struggle – NOS

According to the Central Bureau for Statistics (CBS) is the high time to use the terms indigenous and ethnic minorities to be deleted. “We want no one against the head punches”, says Jan Battens, hoofddemograaf at CBS.

The CBS and the Scientific Council for Government policy (WRR) will stop from today, with the use of the terms allochthonous and autochthonous. In particular, the first made from the beginning for lack of clarity. But because CBS has a different definition than the oxford English Dictionary.

Worker

The term minority was used by the government for the first time in a publication in 1971. Sociologist Hilda Verwey-Jonker used the word in a report for the department of Culture, Recreation and Social Work, to replace the term immigrant.

And immigrant was precisely created to the loaded term “immigrant worker” are to be avoided. More and more foreigners after the Second world War, they came to the Netherlands – initially temporary – to-work, established himself permanently in the Netherlands and therefore this term fallen out of favor.

In a few decades we came so through a guest worker and immigrant to ethnic minorities. Released In 1989 that word for the first time in a publication of the WRR. The government now wants to stop the use of the term, because it is not more just enough and stigmatizing work.

Connotations

According to the latest Van Dale Large Dictionary of the Dutch Language means ethnic minorities “from elsewhere coming’ or ‘someone from elsewhere coming’.

The CBS uses a different definition: there is an extraneous ‘a person of whom at least one parent born abroad’. So if you have Dutch parents and you during a vacation in Spain is born, then you for the Of Dale a minority but according to the CBS.