When I hear someone complain about “foreigners” coming to profit off our wealthy little country, and blame them, or “Brussels”, or “the elite”, for everything wrong in their life, I try to understand where that complaint comes from. Because it might be entirely justified.
Housing is too expensive. There aren’t enough affordable homes. A lot of essential work is done by people who don’t speak our language yet. Prices keep climbing. We’re being asked to decarbonise everything at once. Money is going to wars we didn’t start and want those to end sooner than later. Rules keep arriving from Brussels. Freedoms seem to disappear.
Give it five minutes and you arrive at a long, possibly very legitimate list of things that impact your life.
But perhaps, somewhere on that list, it slips into distortion. An asylum center gets announced and the reaction isn’t “we need more housing”, instead, it becomes “they’re taking ours”. Farmers need to scale down, but we expect the supermarkets to remain piled high with cheap food. The police should catch criminals instead of hassling citizens, but at the same time violence against them increases. A children’s character can’t look the way it used to, and a candy can’t be named what it used to be named. Soon enough the complaint isn’t about policy at all. It’s about them: the ones that come to steal away all that is rightfully ours. The lazy people, the criminals and the thugs, those unwilling to integrate, those who are secretly running things, coming to replace us, or force their beliefs upon us.
Set that aside for a moment, please, and go back to the average, reasonable complaint. By that, I don’t mean the Dutch weather. I mean the actual factual topics in society.
Nitrogen restrictions and an overloaded power grid are slowing down home construction. The asylum system is understaffed and overwhelmed, which is why the news keeps showing the same overflow centers. Nature reserves and farming interests are in genuine, difficult tension, and nobody has found a solution that everyone involved can live with. Essential workers are underpaid and undervalued, while shareholders take large profits and often smaller tax bills than the people doing the actual work.
The real question is whether we can get past naming the symptoms and start addressing the cause? Not the blunt, everyone’s-the-same, hand-wave version of “addressing the cause”; but rather, the version that’s actually been thought through.
Because if you say you want to solve “the immigration problem”, you need to know what you’re actually talking about, starting with why asylum seekers exist in the first place. If you say you want to fix high prices, you need to be honest about your own buying habits, and understand that individual choices, added up, produce exactly the market you didn’t see coming. If you say “Brussels” or “those in government” do things you disagree with, that’s also a question about how you vote and whether you’re cherry-picking which of their decisions are valid and which are inconvenient. And if you have zero interest in understanding another way of life, if “they should just adapt” is the whole of your position, if you’ve never once asked whether another culture might have something worth learning from, you’re not going to arrive at a solution. You’re going to arrive at a slogan.
Which wars, and which conditions, produce a migration flow? Think it through.
Who does the work the complaining Dutchman won't do? Think it through.
Why is the Dutch road network one of the best in Europe? Think it through.
The Convenience Principle
Our government, like most, is based on the rule of law, a constitution, and a societal structure that allows living in freedom. We are free to complain, we can study where and what we want, we have a universal healthcare system, and an infrastructure that generally makes things very easy. Brussels gave us consumer protection, the abolition of roaming charges, and unrestricted travel across EU borders. And “we” fly budget airlines to warm countries every chance we get.
What’s the connecting thread? Not stupidity. Convenience.
We are so used to comfort and speed that we’ve stopped noticing the actual cost of things. What exactly is so urgent that you need same-day ordering and next-morning delivery? The local supermarket closes because it can’t compete anymore. “But what am I supposed to do when I need a bag of lettuce and a jar of peanut butter at the end of the day?”. Meanwhile, every other grocery run goes through a fifteen-minute delivery app. A neighbor once complained to me that the local convenience store had closed. “Another iconic Dutch company, gone”. I asked whether, and how often, he’d actually shopped there. Once or twice, he said. Too expensive. “I’m not stupid. I’m not going to pay more for something I can just order online”. So he ordered a cheaper alternative from a Chinese platform instead.
On holiday in Bodrum, Turkey, we walked through the historical museum, where every placard was in Turkish and English. That evening, a table of Germans nearby complained that nothing had been translated into German. “We have so many Turks in Germany. The least they could do is speak German here”. On a business trip, sitting at a table with people from half a dozen countries, in a small, authentic restaurant next to our hotel serving a traditional local menu, one of the group complained there was no burger, fries, and ketchup on offer. “That’s the least you’d expect, on top of all this local stuff”.
None of these people think of themselves as hypocrites. That’s the point. The gap between the principle we claim and the convenience we choose is invisible from the inside, and it runs in exactly one direction: toward whatever’s easiest for us, right here, right now.
Across the Spectrum
It would be convenient (no pun intended) to make this a story about one kind of person. It isn’t.
- You’re against foreigners taking your job, but you order from a platform shipping goods from the other side of the world because it’s cheaper, and you wouldn’t spend a single night shift at a distribution center yourself.
- You’re against animal cruelty, but you buy the cheapest factory-farmed chicken because “biodynamic is a scam”, and you complain when meat prices rise due to stricter welfare laws.
- You’re against the invasion of privacy, but you hand over your location, biometric data, and shopping history to a tech giant for a two-Euro discount coupon.
- You want green energy and an end to Russian gas, but you don’t want a wind turbine on your horizon, a solar field near your village, or a nuclear plant anywhere within driving distance.
- You want a cheap flight to Barcelona, and you curse the nitrogen rules slowing down housing construction, without connecting the two.
- You want the landscape protected from ugly distribution centers and foreign delivery drivers, while clicking “order now” on a shirt that will be flown across the world, sorted by an underpaid worker in exactly the kind of warehouse you’re complaining about, and delivered by an underpaid driver in a diesel van through your street.
- You call your own move abroad an adventure: “expat” life in Spain or some exotic foreign location, rarely learning the language, clustering with people from home, expecting locals to meet you halfway. When someone moves here for survival instead of sun, they’re a “profiteur”. We export our culture and call it tourism. They bring theirs, and we call it invasion.
- You want first-rate healthcare and your parents properly cared for, while supporting policies that would turn away the exact people currently running the blood work and emptying the bedpans.
And before you say this is all political: this just isn’t a left/right pattern really.
Progressives who care about workers order from Temu. Conservatives who love free markets complain when the local shop closes because the free market did its job. Environmentalists rule out nuclear, then ask why electricity is expensive. Nationalists vote to close the borders, then wonder why there’s nobody to pick the tomatoes or staff the healthcare sector. Libertarians want less government, until they want government to fix exactly this. Socialists want to tax the rich and build public housing, until it’s proposed for their own street.
Everyone has a version. Nobody’s exempt, including the people telling this story.
Follow the Chain
Here’s the actual method, if you want to try it on the next thing that annoys you. Not “who’s to blame”, but a chain of questions, each one accepting the last answer and pushing one layer past it.
“We have a housing shortage.”
Yes. That’s true.
But: how much of that shortage comes from immigration? How much from smaller households? How much from decades of underbuilding? How much from wanting to live bigger than we used to? Maybe the housing shortage isn’t an immigration problem, it’s a planning problem that migration happens to make visible. Think it through.
“There are too many labor migrants.”
Yes. A lot of people feel that.
But: who’s picking the asparagus tomorrow? Who’s working the night shift? Who’s driving the distribution centers? Maybe the real question is why our economic model became dependent on cheap labor in the first place. Think it through.
“We should stop funding this war, it isn’t ours.”
Yes. Plenty of people feel exactly that, and the cost is real.
But: what happens to international law, and the principle that aggression gets answered rather than rewarded, if we don’t? What message does that send to the next country that gets invaded? Maybe the real question isn’t whether to fund it, but what kind of peace we’re actually willing to stand behind, and what it costs later to have skipped preventing the next war in order to save on this one. Think it through.
That’s the whole exercise. Accept the complaint: it’s usually not fabricated. Complicate it with the next question. Reframe toward the actual mechanism. Repeat until the chain runs out, or until it runs back to a choice you made yourself.
The point
Democracy and society don’t just need informed citizens. They need citizens capable of second-order thinking: not just “immigration increases housing demand”, but what causes migration, what work migrants do, what happens if they leave, what else is driving the housing market, which effects are local and which are global. The problem isn’t that people are stupid. It’s that complex systems are expensive to think about, and slogans are free.
Maybe the problem isn’t that we complain too much. Maybe it’s that we don’t think it through far enough. We treat social problems as isolated events, when almost everything we complain about is connected, directly or indirectly, to choices we make ourselves. That doesn’t mean you’re wrong to be angry. It means a solution starts exactly where the slogan stops.
Think . it . through .
Because the next time I hear someone complain about any of this, I’d rather have a conversation about what we are actually willing to pay for a solution, instead of hiding behind a slogan that costs us nothing.
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