Jan H. van de Beek, Hans Roodenburg, Joop Hartog and Gerrit W. Kreffer
In a way, this report can be seen as an update and extension of the CPB report Immigration and the Dutch Economy from 20031 . That CPB report, among other things, calculated the costs and benefits for the treasury of non-Western immigration at the time. Since that report, the government has no longer calculated these tax costs and benefits of immigration in a general sense. This is striking because in the Netherlands just about everything that is relevant to policy is regularly monitored in all kinds of ways. And given its considerable size in the last decades, immigration to the Netherlands can certainly be considered policy-relevant.
The fact that the CPB report from 2003 has not received a full update is not least due to normative limitations. In this context, the late minister Eberhard van der Laan said in the NOS-journaal news program of 4 September 2009 that the cabinet is not interested in putting people along the yardstick of euros. The then director of the CPB, Laura van Geest, stated in an interview: 2 “I don’t think you should talk about refugees and start calculating something.” And Klaas Dijkhoff stated in 2016 as State Secretary for Security and Justice in response to parliamentary questions 3 that the government does not evaluate citizens, but policy. Country of origin is personal data that, “in accordance with the principles of the rule of law, is not relevant to most policy areas,” says Dijkhoff.
There are three underlying – often implicit – arguments that play a role in this: ‘one should not calculate the value of a human life’, ‘one should not blame the victim’ and ‘one should not play into the hands of the extreme right’. 4 None of these three arguments makes sense upon closer consideration.
Let’s begin with the argument that one should not ‘calculate the value of a human life’. It is sometimes noted that it would not be ethically acceptable to calculate the costs and benefits of immigrants. Humanitarian reasons and human solidarity would oppose this. This argument is already very easy to refute for immigrant workers because their arrival is often defended on the basis of economic selfinterest. But it doesn’t really make sense for family immigrants and refugees either. Few residents would welcome immigrants at any cost, for example, for whom it does not matter whether immigration reduces their income by a small percentage or cuts their income by a quarter.