CUER

The Netherlands ponders over diversity issues. An Economist excerpt from the March 31st, 2005 issue:

Faced with the challenge of absorbing immigrants from traditional societies–and drawing the right line between curbing extremism and fostering diversity–Dutch common sense will certainly help, but may not be enough. Like their American counterparts, the ideologues of the new Dutch right have won a wide hearing for the idea that values are important. They have yet to convince Dutch society that they have found the right means of upholding these principles.

For further reading, go read “The Dutch Model: Multiculturalism and Muslim Immigrants” by Jane Kramer in the April 3rd, 2006 issue of the New Yorker, in which there is another interesting article on the poverty identity. In Relatively Deprived: How Poor Is Poor?, John Cassidy talks about the idea called “relative reprivation”:

Introducing a relative-poverty line would help shift attention to this larger problem of social exclusion. Although few attempts have been made to address the issue, the results have been promising. A recent long-term study of Head Start, which began in 1964, as one of the original “war on poverty” initiatives, found that poor children who participated in the program were more likely to finish high school and less likely to be arrested for committing crimes than those who did not. And in another initiative, undertaken between 1976 and 1998, the city of Chicago relocated thousands of impoverished African-Americans from inner-city projects to subsidized housing in middle-class, predominantly white suburbs; researchers found that the adults who participated were more likely to be employed, and their children were more likely to graduate from high school, than their inner-city counterparts. (A more recent experiment, in which the federal government gave vouchers to poor residents in a number of cities, enabling them to move to wealthier neighborhoods, has failed to produce similar gains. Many of the participants chose to live near one another, which researchers think may account for the disappointing results.)