‘Think of a foreigner in his time. For the kindness.” That’s what it sounded like the SIRE advertisement of 1974, against xenophobia. Half a century later, the asylum discussion has soured to such an extent that the most recent SIRE commercial is no longer about being nice to foreigners but about continuing to be nice to your loved ones. “They’re just fortune seekers,” father shouts to daughter in the 2026 radio commercial. Moral of the story: Are you winning an argument now? Or losing each other?
SIRE touches on something essential. I fear we are indeed losing each other. The column of Fidelity-writer Sylvain Ephimenco was lost, for example. He is one of the few colleagues who really made you curious about what he thought about things, which made you sit on the edge of your seat for a moment. He stopped after that Fidelity felt it was necessary to apologize for one column in which he linked the water shortage, the shortage of connections to the electricity grid and the housing shortage to migration.
Because the shortages of electricity, water and housing were not caused by migration, one thought readerthe Ombudsman and the editor-in-chief. The water shortage was caused by neoliberalism, climate change, pollution or mismanagement. And that is why he received a red card from the referee.
Unjustified in my opinion. Population growth is indeed one of the causes of the greater demand for water, energy and houses. Says it RIVMsay VNO-NCWsay the central government. The State Commission on Demographic Development literally writes that the precise consequences of demographic developments for energy and water use are uncertain, but: “The challenges will increase with a larger population and at the current level of use.” And that population increase has been purely the result of migration for more than ten years.
First of all: I understand why it is an unpleasant column. It is also not my taste to blame the stranger, a powerless one, for our problems. But everyone is free to place a different emphasis within the framework of the truth itself. There are people who blame the housing shortage mainly on divorces, and divorces in turn on feminism or secularization. The woman and the atheist are blamed. I think it’s all possible. No, it has to be done. I want to read and understand all those voices.
We are losing each other. In the public debate, there is no throwing of cobras as in Loosdrecht, nor of expletives as in the SIRE advertisement or threats such as against politicians, but of facts. That is also a form of escalation. Intellectual poverty, moreover. A deeply ideological issue such as migration is reduced to the question of whose figures are correct.
Postmodern people should also simply force you to look at the underlying issue once
I was under the impression that the era in which it was only about news versus fake news, alternative facts, was on its way out. That people would see through that trick, that: ‘you with your emotions, I stick to the facts’. I thought we would gradually look back with shame and bewilderment on the madness of ten years ago where the election of Trump and Brexit were blamed on voters who had been given the wrong information. The belief that people would vaccinate if there were no social media. That if all those people had simply read the same articles, the same newspaper, the same information as us, they would have exhibited the correct behavior and voted the correct way. In short, that our differences of opinion were based on a misunderstanding.
But no, Ephimenco’s column is criticized not for its approach but for the facts. There are few subjects where this should play such a subordinate role as in migration. Even the postmodern person who, in the absence of a new moral framework, desperately tries to cling to the remaining splinters of scientific truth, should simply force you to take one look at the underlying issue: Not just how much, but how much is a lot? How far does humanity extend? How great is the capacity of a society to accommodate needy people with a completely different language and culture who come here for shelter? Do we all owe them something? And if not, what is permissible within the limits of civilization to keep out or send back those people who have to go home?
Let me then adopt the moralizing SIRE tone. For once, I beg you, as adults, let us have a slightly more in-depth conversation about the origins of our differences in opinion. Don’t look at your tables, but look at each other with interest. Towards each other’s larger view of humanity and the world. Because I think that’s the only way not to lose each other.
And no, I have nothing at all to substantiate that.
