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https://pure.knaw.nl/ws/files/1729086/2015_Bovenkerk_en_Fokkema_EJC_post_print_0087.pdf
"It has now been fifty years since the first Moroccan men came to the Netherlands as guest workers or labour migrants. Especially after the oil crisis of 1973 and the economic recession of the early 1980s, approximately half of them had their families come as well, starting with the Moroccan immigrant community, which, according to Statistics Netherlands, now (1 January 2014) consists of 374,694 people. A first generation, a 1.5 generation that grew up partly in Morocco and then in the Netherlands, and a second generation of Moroccan-Dutch persons can now be distinguished. Although the majority has Dutch or dual citizenship (Loozen et al. 2012: 37), it is still common practice in the Netherlands to label all generations as Moroccans. About two-thirds come from (a) the Rif mountain region along the north coast, (b) the south in the area around Agadir (Souss) and Ouarzazate, and (c) the cities of Tangiers, Casablanca, Fes, Meknes, Marrakech and Rabat. In the Netherlands, most Moroccans live in the four large cities of the Randstad conurbation: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht [...]
Ever since the early 1990s, young men from this group are believed to have posed a persistent crime problem that not only includes disturbing the peace and vandalism but also high-impact offences such as mugging, burglary and armed robbery. [...]
It initially seemed as if the high figures could be explained by an over-representation of young Moroccan men in the lower socio-economic segments of society. But as far back as 1990, Junger notes on the basis of self-reported data that Moroccan crime rates for this age group are significantly higher than the average in the lowest socio-economic segments of society and those of other minorities. Based on Dutch Police Department suspect figures (HKS: Herkenningsdienstsysteem, Police Identification Service System) for 2009, researchers at the Netherlands Institute for Social Research calculated the extent to which general risk factors (sex, age, educational level, income, urbanisation) determine the level of overrepresentation of various groups of non-Western youths. It was lowest in the case of Moroccans (van Noije and Kessels 2012: 214-215). A second plausible explanation is that Moroccans’ over-representation in crime statistics is the result of selective policing and discrimination. Recently there has been a heated discussion on the issue of ethnic profiling by the Dutch police. The results of empirical research are not conclusive so far (Bovenkerk 2014, Cankaya 2012, Svensson and Saharso 2014). However, as Junger-Tas argued about the exceptional rise of Moroccan crime rates that began to appear in the 1990s: ‘Even if the police is prejudiced this would not explain the disparities in crime rates between various minorities. Why would the police discriminate Moroccans more than other ethnic groups?’
Dutch ethnic studies researchers often make references to Moroccans’ regional background and culture. High delinquency rates are assumed to be the result of (1) the primitive conditions in the rural regions most of the immigrants come from and (2) the Berber culture of the Rif Mountains in the north, with its resistance towards the central government, where approximately two thirds of them are from. Such notions are based mainly upon small scale ethnographic fieldwork among groups of problematic young Moroccan men in large Dutch cities (van Gemert 1998; Werdmölder 1997), pedagogical research in Moroccan families, and psychological studies of individual criminals in the Netherlands (Brons et al. 2008). How do such insights fit into the theories on crime and immigration, and – this is the core of this article – do they stand up to a quantitative test: to what extent can differences in crime rates among young Moroccan men be attributed to their regional descent ? This question is answered by comparing Dutch criminal records (ever suspected of a crime) of young Moroccan men who have a background in the countryside respectively the Rif with those who originate in cities respectively other parts of Morocco.
[...] Assumptions that crime rates of first-generation immigrants are higher than average have been consistently contradicted by scientific research that shows lower crime rates instead. Such findings on immigrant crime in 1920s America by Chicago sociologists (Park et al. 1967) were confirmed in Europe by Ferracuti, who wrote a comprehensive work on the topic in 1968. In 1996, Yeager once again corroborated this ‘general rule’ in a meta-analysis that also included experiences in Canada and Australia. For violent crime, Robert J. Sampson has shown that in the US ‘cities of concentrated immigration are some of the safest places around’ (Sampson 2008: 30) [...] But it was also noted that immigrants ‘import’ their countries’ crime traditions to a certain extent. For example, first-generation southern Italians were relatively likely to commit homicides and Finns more apt to commit crimes directly related to excessive drinking (Sutherland 1939: 125). Moreover, the crime rates for many second-generation immigrants born in the new land were found to be higher than average for their age group."
"Social disorganisation theory (Shaw and McKay 1942) argues that an absence of social cohesion and normative consensus leads to crime. This theory has served to explain the patterns of high crime rates in areas that Chicagoans called zones of transition – poor city neighbourhoods where immigrant children grew up under conditions of economic deprivation, physical deterioration and high resident turnover. The heterogeneity and transience of the population in these areas made it particularly difficult to organise the neighbourhood and supervise children. At the same time, Chicagoans did see that some groups exhibited greater social disorganisation than others, even if their socio-economic status was the same. The Chicago researchers explained this by noting that groups could escape from disorganisation by preserving their social cohesion or forming a ‘colony’ or ‘ghetto’ (Park et al. 1967: 107).
Aronowitz (2002) uses this notion in order to explain the effectiveness of social control of juvenile delinquents in the Turkish community of Berlin today. Within their own circle in Germany, for a while, people were able to preserve their traditional mechanisms of social control. She finds that crime rates among the second generation born in Germany is higher than those of youngsters who were born and educated in Turkey and brought to Berlin as children (i.e. what we call the 1.5 generation)."
"A second line of theory-building would later be called relative deprivation or strain theory (Merton 1949). Strain theorists of Chicago argued that the parents’ generation was satisfied with simple jobs and a low income in the host country because they compared them with the economic and political conditions in their native country. However, the second generation compared themselves at school and on the street with Americans and had higher material demands, which led to strain and possibly to crime."
"The theory of cultural conflict or cultural dissonance (Sellin 1938) focuses on the immigrant experience of people being thrust into a milieu in which cultures and ‘conduct norms’ clash, particularly when rural immigrants find themselves in a cosmopolitan city setting. The first generation of immigrants may live in the culture in which they have been brought up in the country of origin. The second generation suffers most from the conflict of cultures. Children of immigrants are vulnerable when they find themselves in the no-man’s land between two cultures. They may have been neither able to internalise the culture of their parents or to integrate into the new society. The 1.5 generation takes an intermediate position. Shoham (1962: 212) specified this theory by pointing at the possibility that the economic status of the head of the family will often be ‘injured’ in the process of integration. This leaves youngsters in a state of confusion that pushes them into the ‘street culture’ to become juvenile delinquents."
"Surprisingly, none of these three theories has paid explicit attention to the specific social, cultural or political backgrounds the immigrants had in their country of origin. The link between immigrants’ origin and crime in the theory of social disorganisation is indirect and unspecified: the mere fact that immigrants settle in poor neighbourhoods that are in a continuous state of demographic flux results in social disorganisation. This in turn increases the crime rate. The motor of criminality in the strain theory lies in the attraction of ‘success goals’ of affluent American society and the lack of legitimate means to attain them. A lack of education or experience working in modern industrial conditions absent in the country of origin are not explicitly taken into account."
"In his theoretical frameworks for theory and research about the immigrant-crime nexus, Mears encourages us explicitly to take background variables in the country of emigration and subpopulations within the immigrant flow into account (Mears 2001:10). Thomas finds a delinquent’s background relevant as immigrants enter the new country with ‘tremendously varied experiences in their home countries, communities, family, and friendship networks’ (Thomas 2011: 384).
Dutch researchers are an exception in this respect. In the Dutch tradition of cultural geography and ethnography, researchers have long included immigrants’ backgrounds when describing and analysing their social problems. They have conducted fieldwork in the countries of emigration (e.g. Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles, Turkey, Morocco), and more precisely in the regions where immigrants predominantly have come from (van Amersfoort 1982). In Morocco they studied the varying levels of social capital among the sending population (De Mas 1987) and the family history of the emigrants (van den Berg-Eldering 1978)."
"Dutch researchers discussed the possible causes of crime problems in the 1.5 generation. Did the criminality of young migrants start before the move or after they settled in the Netherlands ? Werdmölder (1997) and van den Berg-Eldering (1978) show that youngsters who arrived in the Netherlands as the 1.5 generation were already engaged in criminal activities or juvenile delinquency in Morocco. This has to do with the Moroccan way of bringing up children, especially in the Berber region of the Rif. Young children are brought up by their mother, but starting at the age of eight the father is responsible. Boys become part of the men’s world and spend a lot of time outside the home. They spend time at school, on the street and at the market. As their fathers are in Europe, there is no one to discipline and correct them. For mothers, the risk of losing their grip on their sons and having them ‘go bad’ was an important reason to insist on family reunification in Europe. Social control, to the extent that it still existed in Morocco, decreased further in the Netherlands.
More in general, Moroccan crime in the Netherlands is often explained by the fact that most of these immigrants originate from an underdeveloped countryside and from the northern Rif area, which has a reputation for ‘rough individualism’ and political rebelliousness. Dutch researchers’ descriptions of the major regions of Moroccans’ provenance have found their way to a larger public, and their argument that Moroccan’s overrepresentation in crime statistics is attributable to the specificities of these regions is now considered as ‘social fact’ that is disseminated in universities and in special courses on minorities for law-enforcement personnel. Specialists comment in the media on conspicuous incidents of crime that involve persons with an immigration background from the north of Morocco. The theme is often discussed among ‘Moroccan’ intellectuals in the Netherlands (e.g. in the novel Bad boy by Abdelkader Benali). Police officers, attorneys and local authorities make ‘discovery trips’ to the Rif area in order to gain insight into the background of the problem."
"The ‘social fact’ that the rural and Rif background of the majority of Moroccan immigrants to the Netherlands is largely responsible for their high crime rates, implicitly or explicitly assumes differences in crime rates by regional descent. The assumption goes that if the migration from Morocco to the Netherlands were less selective, with more people from cities and modern regions than the Rif area, there would be less of a Moroccan crime problem."
"Given the sociological theories of immigration described above, it is only logical to assume that the more the native region and host country differ socioeconomically and in terms of modernity, the greater the gap and the longer it takes to integrate. For example, immigrants from a close-knit community in the poor countryside who have not had much education have more trouble transitioning to an anonymous urban environment than well-educated urbanites. Eisenstadt followed this line of reasoning when he explained the high crime rates among Sephardic Jews (Moroccans !) in Israel as follows: ‘The disorganisation of the immigrant group, instability of social relations, and of various types of norm-breaking, juvenile delinquency, crime etc. is strongest among those groups whose cultural and educational standards are much lower than those of the absorbing society’ (Eisenstadt 1954: 261). Similarly, Junger-Tas (1997: 300-301), who has been the advocate of integration theory in the Netherlands, explains high crime rates among immigrant minorities through their weak socio-economic position that results from a considerable ‘culture lag’ with respect to the home country. She specified the cultural dimension of the conflict of cultures.
There were differences between values such as traditionalism versus modernism, respect for authority versus democratic decision-making, etc."
"The conditions for explaining crime through differences in economic development and culture between the Moroccan countryside and urban Netherlands seem fulfilled. The socioeconomic and cultural distance from the Moroccan countryside to Dutch urban society is huge. Two-thirds of all immigrants came from rural areas, and here we include the smaller towns Al Hoceima and Nador. Bouras (2012: 52) notes in her history of Moroccans in the Netherlands that people from the countryside had much larger families than those from the cities, and had to make much more of a transition from their traditional lifestyle to settle in the Netherlands. The literature on Moroccan emigration gives examples of illiterate women who had their first experience with city life when they came to Europe and had a very hard time coping with modernity. How were they supposed to raise their children in this environment ? Pels and de Haan (2007) write about parents facing child-rearing uncertainty. Moroccan fathers were also all too aware that the contrast between the old and new cultures could lead to behavioural problems on the part of their children. They could foresee that their children would be exposed to the ‘depravity of the West’, which is why they resisted the idea of family reunification for such a long time (Eldering 1995).
If the socio-economic and cultural distance is what determines how hard it is to bridge the gap, Moroccans from the countryside might be expected to be more apt to develop criminal behaviour than those from the cities. This would particularly hold for the second generation and, to a lesser extent, the 1.5 generation, given their higher likelihood to suffer from conflict of cultures and their higher material demands."
"Apart from the rurality of the Rif Mountains, the level of development of this area has been notoriously low (De Mas 1987). Using the concept of social capital, De Mas (1987) explains the contrast in regional mentality, entrepreneurship and extent of integration in the national state between the southern Souss and the northern Rif Mountains in Morocco. There are geographic and historical reasons why the Rif fell behind in the development process (De Mas 2001). With its steep cliffs on the coasts, for those in power the Rif was always a buffer zone against invasions from the north instead of an integral part of the country. Until recently, the Rif was the poorest part of the country. Between 1912 and 1956, when Morocco was colonised by the French, the Rif was Spanish and remained underdeveloped. Its inhabitants speak one of the Berber languages, Spanish and Moroccan Arabic, but not French. The region was originally a tribal society, but was administered by Arab officials and not Berbers. After independence, King Hassan II developed a hostile relationship with his subjects in the region by violently suppressing the rebellions in 1958-1959. In ethnography the social structure of the Rif tribes is described as weak, and families distrust each other (Hart 2000). There is hardly a level of social or political control above the level of individual families. When the father is absent because he works overseas as a migratory worker, his sons grow up in relative freedom. This accounts for the deviance of the 1.5 generation. The second generation grows up in Europe, where the patriarch of the family has lost much of his control over his children. It is difficult to exert corrective social control over the younger generation in a group where social cohesion is low and where families distrust each other."
"The study focuses on men of Moroccan descent in the 15–25 age group living in the Netherlands at the beginning of 2009 and on the reference date of 24 September 2010. The research population includes a total of 32,400 Moroccan men in the 15–25 age group. The study is restricted to Moroccan men because the percentage of Moroccan male suspects is more than five times higher than that of Moroccan female suspects [...] We restrict our study to the 15–25 age group because the percentages of suspects are much higher in this age category of the Moroccan population than in any other cohort."
"Crime rates in the Netherlands are higher among Moroccans who come from the countryside and the Rif or whose parents do than among those who come from the urban provinces in Morocco and from outside the Rif or whose parents do.
The influence of descent on criminality should be put into the proper perspective. Differences in geographic descent may be significant but they are small. After controlling for the three demographic characteristics, the likelihood of having been suspected of a criminal offence is 1.138 greater for 15–25-year-old Moroccans with a rural background and 1.106 greater for those with roots in the Rif. This limited influence of geographic descent on the likelihood of having been suspected of a criminal offence also manifests itself in the low percentage variance explained by this variable, i.e. the explained variance is no more than 0.1% (see Model 1). Because of the large size of the research population, this limited effect is nonetheless significant."
"Socio-economic position is an extremely
important predictor of having ever been suspected of a criminal offence, as is witnessed by the
sharp rise from 12% in the explained part of the variance. The higher the educational, income
and employment levels, the lower the likelihood of having been suspected of a criminal
offence. Geographic descent differences are smaller after correcting for socio-economic
differences, though they remain significant. Hence Hypotheses 1c and 2c fail to be confirmed,
and the fact that Moroccans with a rural and Rif background are more likely to have been
suspected of a criminal offence is not related to a socio-economically disadvantaged position
in the Netherlands."
"Statistical significance, however, is not equivalent to scientific importance. The explanatory power of the regional difference is no higher than 0.1%, which is far less than one might expect based on the scholarly and policy-related literature. That a significant correlation between regional descent and criminality is nonetheless observed has to do with the large size of the research population.
Socio-economic status in the Netherlands exerts a considerably greater explanatory power, and there is only partial evidence that regional descent differences in Morocco manifest themselves in current socio-economic differences. Unemployment, a low educational level and a low income are much better predictors of having ever been suspected of a criminal offence than geographic descent. The findings encourage us to seek the causes of Moroccan criminality in the Netherlands rather than Morocco. There is also a difference between the criminality of the 1.5 and the first generation: regardless of their regional descent, children who arrived in the Netherlands at an early age are clearly more likely to have been suspected of a criminal offence than children who spent their entire youth in Morocco.
The conclusion is that if we take a closer look, Moroccan criminality is a general phenomenon in the Netherlands and not the result of the rural or Rif background of many immigrants. Considering the expectation aroused in the literature about the regional background of Moroccan criminality in the Netherlands, this is a rather unexpected conclusion. It can perhaps be explained in part by the limitations of the dataset. We lack access to data on internal migration that might have preceded emigration to Europe. We do not know how many ‘rural urbanites’, as van den Berg-Eldering (1978) calls them, are included in the group we categorise here as rural. This limitation is important, since male migrants sometimes deliberately had their families get used to life in Moroccan cities so the cultural transition would not be all too extreme. The result might also have been different had the correlation between regional descent and criminality been examined at a lower aggregation level. After all, a high crime rate in a region as a whole can be based upon a criminal tradition of one or more places. Lastly, we should also note the risk of a false causal interpretation of our research results if having a job and an education considerably reduce the risk of joining the criminal path. It is also possible that the crime rate among young men is so high that in itself it is a reason to not qualify for a job or education.
Despite these limitations, the present study demonstrates that with respect to the assumption about the immigrant-crime nexus, here again there is no reason to attach all too much significance to the possibly criminogenic background of where immigrants come from and their culture. In this case, we have tested the hypotheses against regional differences in one country. Up to now, immigrant crime rates have only been compared between native countries, and this leads to comparability problems. We focussed on regional differentiation within one country, so this methodological drawback plays much less of a role. For the time being, we concur with Solivetti (2010), who concludes on the grounds of a comparison between various immigrant groups in different immigration countries that the features of the host societies, more than the features of the native countries, explain more about the criminality within ethnic groups."
-Frank Bovenkerk & Tineke Fokkema, "Crime among young Moroccan men in the Netherlands. Does their regional origin matter ?", European Journal of Criminology, 2016, 13(3), 352-371.
"It has now been fifty years since the first Moroccan men came to the Netherlands as guest workers or labour migrants. Especially after the oil crisis of 1973 and the economic recession of the early 1980s, approximately half of them had their families come as well, starting with the Moroccan immigrant community, which, according to Statistics Netherlands, now (1 January 2014) consists of 374,694 people. A first generation, a 1.5 generation that grew up partly in Morocco and then in the Netherlands, and a second generation of Moroccan-Dutch persons can now be distinguished. Although the majority has Dutch or dual citizenship (Loozen et al. 2012: 37), it is still common practice in the Netherlands to label all generations as Moroccans. About two-thirds come from (a) the Rif mountain region along the north coast, (b) the south in the area around Agadir (Souss) and Ouarzazate, and (c) the cities of Tangiers, Casablanca, Fes, Meknes, Marrakech and Rabat. In the Netherlands, most Moroccans live in the four large cities of the Randstad conurbation: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht [...]
Ever since the early 1990s, young men from this group are believed to have posed a persistent crime problem that not only includes disturbing the peace and vandalism but also high-impact offences such as mugging, burglary and armed robbery. [...]
It initially seemed as if the high figures could be explained by an over-representation of young Moroccan men in the lower socio-economic segments of society. But as far back as 1990, Junger notes on the basis of self-reported data that Moroccan crime rates for this age group are significantly higher than the average in the lowest socio-economic segments of society and those of other minorities. Based on Dutch Police Department suspect figures (HKS: Herkenningsdienstsysteem, Police Identification Service System) for 2009, researchers at the Netherlands Institute for Social Research calculated the extent to which general risk factors (sex, age, educational level, income, urbanisation) determine the level of overrepresentation of various groups of non-Western youths. It was lowest in the case of Moroccans (van Noije and Kessels 2012: 214-215). A second plausible explanation is that Moroccans’ over-representation in crime statistics is the result of selective policing and discrimination. Recently there has been a heated discussion on the issue of ethnic profiling by the Dutch police. The results of empirical research are not conclusive so far (Bovenkerk 2014, Cankaya 2012, Svensson and Saharso 2014). However, as Junger-Tas argued about the exceptional rise of Moroccan crime rates that began to appear in the 1990s: ‘Even if the police is prejudiced this would not explain the disparities in crime rates between various minorities. Why would the police discriminate Moroccans more than other ethnic groups?’
Dutch ethnic studies researchers often make references to Moroccans’ regional background and culture. High delinquency rates are assumed to be the result of (1) the primitive conditions in the rural regions most of the immigrants come from and (2) the Berber culture of the Rif Mountains in the north, with its resistance towards the central government, where approximately two thirds of them are from. Such notions are based mainly upon small scale ethnographic fieldwork among groups of problematic young Moroccan men in large Dutch cities (van Gemert 1998; Werdmölder 1997), pedagogical research in Moroccan families, and psychological studies of individual criminals in the Netherlands (Brons et al. 2008). How do such insights fit into the theories on crime and immigration, and – this is the core of this article – do they stand up to a quantitative test: to what extent can differences in crime rates among young Moroccan men be attributed to their regional descent ? This question is answered by comparing Dutch criminal records (ever suspected of a crime) of young Moroccan men who have a background in the countryside respectively the Rif with those who originate in cities respectively other parts of Morocco.
[...] Assumptions that crime rates of first-generation immigrants are higher than average have been consistently contradicted by scientific research that shows lower crime rates instead. Such findings on immigrant crime in 1920s America by Chicago sociologists (Park et al. 1967) were confirmed in Europe by Ferracuti, who wrote a comprehensive work on the topic in 1968. In 1996, Yeager once again corroborated this ‘general rule’ in a meta-analysis that also included experiences in Canada and Australia. For violent crime, Robert J. Sampson has shown that in the US ‘cities of concentrated immigration are some of the safest places around’ (Sampson 2008: 30) [...] But it was also noted that immigrants ‘import’ their countries’ crime traditions to a certain extent. For example, first-generation southern Italians were relatively likely to commit homicides and Finns more apt to commit crimes directly related to excessive drinking (Sutherland 1939: 125). Moreover, the crime rates for many second-generation immigrants born in the new land were found to be higher than average for their age group."
"Social disorganisation theory (Shaw and McKay 1942) argues that an absence of social cohesion and normative consensus leads to crime. This theory has served to explain the patterns of high crime rates in areas that Chicagoans called zones of transition – poor city neighbourhoods where immigrant children grew up under conditions of economic deprivation, physical deterioration and high resident turnover. The heterogeneity and transience of the population in these areas made it particularly difficult to organise the neighbourhood and supervise children. At the same time, Chicagoans did see that some groups exhibited greater social disorganisation than others, even if their socio-economic status was the same. The Chicago researchers explained this by noting that groups could escape from disorganisation by preserving their social cohesion or forming a ‘colony’ or ‘ghetto’ (Park et al. 1967: 107).
Aronowitz (2002) uses this notion in order to explain the effectiveness of social control of juvenile delinquents in the Turkish community of Berlin today. Within their own circle in Germany, for a while, people were able to preserve their traditional mechanisms of social control. She finds that crime rates among the second generation born in Germany is higher than those of youngsters who were born and educated in Turkey and brought to Berlin as children (i.e. what we call the 1.5 generation)."
"A second line of theory-building would later be called relative deprivation or strain theory (Merton 1949). Strain theorists of Chicago argued that the parents’ generation was satisfied with simple jobs and a low income in the host country because they compared them with the economic and political conditions in their native country. However, the second generation compared themselves at school and on the street with Americans and had higher material demands, which led to strain and possibly to crime."
"The theory of cultural conflict or cultural dissonance (Sellin 1938) focuses on the immigrant experience of people being thrust into a milieu in which cultures and ‘conduct norms’ clash, particularly when rural immigrants find themselves in a cosmopolitan city setting. The first generation of immigrants may live in the culture in which they have been brought up in the country of origin. The second generation suffers most from the conflict of cultures. Children of immigrants are vulnerable when they find themselves in the no-man’s land between two cultures. They may have been neither able to internalise the culture of their parents or to integrate into the new society. The 1.5 generation takes an intermediate position. Shoham (1962: 212) specified this theory by pointing at the possibility that the economic status of the head of the family will often be ‘injured’ in the process of integration. This leaves youngsters in a state of confusion that pushes them into the ‘street culture’ to become juvenile delinquents."
"Surprisingly, none of these three theories has paid explicit attention to the specific social, cultural or political backgrounds the immigrants had in their country of origin. The link between immigrants’ origin and crime in the theory of social disorganisation is indirect and unspecified: the mere fact that immigrants settle in poor neighbourhoods that are in a continuous state of demographic flux results in social disorganisation. This in turn increases the crime rate. The motor of criminality in the strain theory lies in the attraction of ‘success goals’ of affluent American society and the lack of legitimate means to attain them. A lack of education or experience working in modern industrial conditions absent in the country of origin are not explicitly taken into account."
"In his theoretical frameworks for theory and research about the immigrant-crime nexus, Mears encourages us explicitly to take background variables in the country of emigration and subpopulations within the immigrant flow into account (Mears 2001:10). Thomas finds a delinquent’s background relevant as immigrants enter the new country with ‘tremendously varied experiences in their home countries, communities, family, and friendship networks’ (Thomas 2011: 384).
Dutch researchers are an exception in this respect. In the Dutch tradition of cultural geography and ethnography, researchers have long included immigrants’ backgrounds when describing and analysing their social problems. They have conducted fieldwork in the countries of emigration (e.g. Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles, Turkey, Morocco), and more precisely in the regions where immigrants predominantly have come from (van Amersfoort 1982). In Morocco they studied the varying levels of social capital among the sending population (De Mas 1987) and the family history of the emigrants (van den Berg-Eldering 1978)."
"Dutch researchers discussed the possible causes of crime problems in the 1.5 generation. Did the criminality of young migrants start before the move or after they settled in the Netherlands ? Werdmölder (1997) and van den Berg-Eldering (1978) show that youngsters who arrived in the Netherlands as the 1.5 generation were already engaged in criminal activities or juvenile delinquency in Morocco. This has to do with the Moroccan way of bringing up children, especially in the Berber region of the Rif. Young children are brought up by their mother, but starting at the age of eight the father is responsible. Boys become part of the men’s world and spend a lot of time outside the home. They spend time at school, on the street and at the market. As their fathers are in Europe, there is no one to discipline and correct them. For mothers, the risk of losing their grip on their sons and having them ‘go bad’ was an important reason to insist on family reunification in Europe. Social control, to the extent that it still existed in Morocco, decreased further in the Netherlands.
More in general, Moroccan crime in the Netherlands is often explained by the fact that most of these immigrants originate from an underdeveloped countryside and from the northern Rif area, which has a reputation for ‘rough individualism’ and political rebelliousness. Dutch researchers’ descriptions of the major regions of Moroccans’ provenance have found their way to a larger public, and their argument that Moroccan’s overrepresentation in crime statistics is attributable to the specificities of these regions is now considered as ‘social fact’ that is disseminated in universities and in special courses on minorities for law-enforcement personnel. Specialists comment in the media on conspicuous incidents of crime that involve persons with an immigration background from the north of Morocco. The theme is often discussed among ‘Moroccan’ intellectuals in the Netherlands (e.g. in the novel Bad boy by Abdelkader Benali). Police officers, attorneys and local authorities make ‘discovery trips’ to the Rif area in order to gain insight into the background of the problem."
"The ‘social fact’ that the rural and Rif background of the majority of Moroccan immigrants to the Netherlands is largely responsible for their high crime rates, implicitly or explicitly assumes differences in crime rates by regional descent. The assumption goes that if the migration from Morocco to the Netherlands were less selective, with more people from cities and modern regions than the Rif area, there would be less of a Moroccan crime problem."
"Given the sociological theories of immigration described above, it is only logical to assume that the more the native region and host country differ socioeconomically and in terms of modernity, the greater the gap and the longer it takes to integrate. For example, immigrants from a close-knit community in the poor countryside who have not had much education have more trouble transitioning to an anonymous urban environment than well-educated urbanites. Eisenstadt followed this line of reasoning when he explained the high crime rates among Sephardic Jews (Moroccans !) in Israel as follows: ‘The disorganisation of the immigrant group, instability of social relations, and of various types of norm-breaking, juvenile delinquency, crime etc. is strongest among those groups whose cultural and educational standards are much lower than those of the absorbing society’ (Eisenstadt 1954: 261). Similarly, Junger-Tas (1997: 300-301), who has been the advocate of integration theory in the Netherlands, explains high crime rates among immigrant minorities through their weak socio-economic position that results from a considerable ‘culture lag’ with respect to the home country. She specified the cultural dimension of the conflict of cultures.
There were differences between values such as traditionalism versus modernism, respect for authority versus democratic decision-making, etc."
"The conditions for explaining crime through differences in economic development and culture between the Moroccan countryside and urban Netherlands seem fulfilled. The socioeconomic and cultural distance from the Moroccan countryside to Dutch urban society is huge. Two-thirds of all immigrants came from rural areas, and here we include the smaller towns Al Hoceima and Nador. Bouras (2012: 52) notes in her history of Moroccans in the Netherlands that people from the countryside had much larger families than those from the cities, and had to make much more of a transition from their traditional lifestyle to settle in the Netherlands. The literature on Moroccan emigration gives examples of illiterate women who had their first experience with city life when they came to Europe and had a very hard time coping with modernity. How were they supposed to raise their children in this environment ? Pels and de Haan (2007) write about parents facing child-rearing uncertainty. Moroccan fathers were also all too aware that the contrast between the old and new cultures could lead to behavioural problems on the part of their children. They could foresee that their children would be exposed to the ‘depravity of the West’, which is why they resisted the idea of family reunification for such a long time (Eldering 1995).
If the socio-economic and cultural distance is what determines how hard it is to bridge the gap, Moroccans from the countryside might be expected to be more apt to develop criminal behaviour than those from the cities. This would particularly hold for the second generation and, to a lesser extent, the 1.5 generation, given their higher likelihood to suffer from conflict of cultures and their higher material demands."
"Apart from the rurality of the Rif Mountains, the level of development of this area has been notoriously low (De Mas 1987). Using the concept of social capital, De Mas (1987) explains the contrast in regional mentality, entrepreneurship and extent of integration in the national state between the southern Souss and the northern Rif Mountains in Morocco. There are geographic and historical reasons why the Rif fell behind in the development process (De Mas 2001). With its steep cliffs on the coasts, for those in power the Rif was always a buffer zone against invasions from the north instead of an integral part of the country. Until recently, the Rif was the poorest part of the country. Between 1912 and 1956, when Morocco was colonised by the French, the Rif was Spanish and remained underdeveloped. Its inhabitants speak one of the Berber languages, Spanish and Moroccan Arabic, but not French. The region was originally a tribal society, but was administered by Arab officials and not Berbers. After independence, King Hassan II developed a hostile relationship with his subjects in the region by violently suppressing the rebellions in 1958-1959. In ethnography the social structure of the Rif tribes is described as weak, and families distrust each other (Hart 2000). There is hardly a level of social or political control above the level of individual families. When the father is absent because he works overseas as a migratory worker, his sons grow up in relative freedom. This accounts for the deviance of the 1.5 generation. The second generation grows up in Europe, where the patriarch of the family has lost much of his control over his children. It is difficult to exert corrective social control over the younger generation in a group where social cohesion is low and where families distrust each other."
"The study focuses on men of Moroccan descent in the 15–25 age group living in the Netherlands at the beginning of 2009 and on the reference date of 24 September 2010. The research population includes a total of 32,400 Moroccan men in the 15–25 age group. The study is restricted to Moroccan men because the percentage of Moroccan male suspects is more than five times higher than that of Moroccan female suspects [...] We restrict our study to the 15–25 age group because the percentages of suspects are much higher in this age category of the Moroccan population than in any other cohort."
"Crime rates in the Netherlands are higher among Moroccans who come from the countryside and the Rif or whose parents do than among those who come from the urban provinces in Morocco and from outside the Rif or whose parents do.
The influence of descent on criminality should be put into the proper perspective. Differences in geographic descent may be significant but they are small. After controlling for the three demographic characteristics, the likelihood of having been suspected of a criminal offence is 1.138 greater for 15–25-year-old Moroccans with a rural background and 1.106 greater for those with roots in the Rif. This limited influence of geographic descent on the likelihood of having been suspected of a criminal offence also manifests itself in the low percentage variance explained by this variable, i.e. the explained variance is no more than 0.1% (see Model 1). Because of the large size of the research population, this limited effect is nonetheless significant."
"Socio-economic position is an extremely
important predictor of having ever been suspected of a criminal offence, as is witnessed by the
sharp rise from 12% in the explained part of the variance. The higher the educational, income
and employment levels, the lower the likelihood of having been suspected of a criminal
offence. Geographic descent differences are smaller after correcting for socio-economic
differences, though they remain significant. Hence Hypotheses 1c and 2c fail to be confirmed,
and the fact that Moroccans with a rural and Rif background are more likely to have been
suspected of a criminal offence is not related to a socio-economically disadvantaged position
in the Netherlands."
"Statistical significance, however, is not equivalent to scientific importance. The explanatory power of the regional difference is no higher than 0.1%, which is far less than one might expect based on the scholarly and policy-related literature. That a significant correlation between regional descent and criminality is nonetheless observed has to do with the large size of the research population.
Socio-economic status in the Netherlands exerts a considerably greater explanatory power, and there is only partial evidence that regional descent differences in Morocco manifest themselves in current socio-economic differences. Unemployment, a low educational level and a low income are much better predictors of having ever been suspected of a criminal offence than geographic descent. The findings encourage us to seek the causes of Moroccan criminality in the Netherlands rather than Morocco. There is also a difference between the criminality of the 1.5 and the first generation: regardless of their regional descent, children who arrived in the Netherlands at an early age are clearly more likely to have been suspected of a criminal offence than children who spent their entire youth in Morocco.
The conclusion is that if we take a closer look, Moroccan criminality is a general phenomenon in the Netherlands and not the result of the rural or Rif background of many immigrants. Considering the expectation aroused in the literature about the regional background of Moroccan criminality in the Netherlands, this is a rather unexpected conclusion. It can perhaps be explained in part by the limitations of the dataset. We lack access to data on internal migration that might have preceded emigration to Europe. We do not know how many ‘rural urbanites’, as van den Berg-Eldering (1978) calls them, are included in the group we categorise here as rural. This limitation is important, since male migrants sometimes deliberately had their families get used to life in Moroccan cities so the cultural transition would not be all too extreme. The result might also have been different had the correlation between regional descent and criminality been examined at a lower aggregation level. After all, a high crime rate in a region as a whole can be based upon a criminal tradition of one or more places. Lastly, we should also note the risk of a false causal interpretation of our research results if having a job and an education considerably reduce the risk of joining the criminal path. It is also possible that the crime rate among young men is so high that in itself it is a reason to not qualify for a job or education.
Despite these limitations, the present study demonstrates that with respect to the assumption about the immigrant-crime nexus, here again there is no reason to attach all too much significance to the possibly criminogenic background of where immigrants come from and their culture. In this case, we have tested the hypotheses against regional differences in one country. Up to now, immigrant crime rates have only been compared between native countries, and this leads to comparability problems. We focussed on regional differentiation within one country, so this methodological drawback plays much less of a role. For the time being, we concur with Solivetti (2010), who concludes on the grounds of a comparison between various immigrant groups in different immigration countries that the features of the host societies, more than the features of the native countries, explain more about the criminality within ethnic groups."
-Frank Bovenkerk & Tineke Fokkema, "Crime among young Moroccan men in the Netherlands. Does their regional origin matter ?", European Journal of Criminology, 2016, 13(3), 352-371.
