Netherlands Moving Quotes

Nevertheless, the idea that Europeans have simply stopped having enough children and must as a result ensure that the next generation is comprised of immigrants is a disastrous fallacy for several reasons. The first is because of the mistaken assumption that a country’s population should always remain the same or indeed continue rising. The nation states of Europe include some of the most densely populated countries on the planet. It is not at all obvious that the quality of life in these countries will improve if the population continues growing. What is more, when migrants arrive in these countries they move to the big cities, not to the remaining sparsely populated areas. So although among European states Britain, along with Belgium and the Netherlands, is one of the most densely populated countries, England taken on its own would be the second most densely populated country in Europe. Migrants tend not to head to the Highlands of Scotland or the wilds of Dartmoor. And so a constantly increasing population causes population problems in areas that are already suffering housing supply problems and where infrastructure like public transport struggles to keep up with swiftly expanding populations.

In the countries with the best maternal and infant outcomes—the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark—women and babies benefit from lifelong universal healthcare, but that care is markedly different: obstetricians attend only high-risk pregnancies. The vast majority of laboring women get individual support from a midwife, are free to move about and birth in whatever position feels best, and are rarely induced, anesthetized, or cut.

Closer to home, the Netherlands’ colonial history was evident on the country’s dining tables and restaurant menus, with Indonesian cuisine offering a rare bright spot among otherwise dire food options. It was common for family celebrations or corporate events to involve a rijsttafel (‘rice table’), a lavish banquet consisting of dozens of gelatinous Indonesian dishes displayed on a vast table. Just as no British town could be complete without an Indian curry house, most Dutch towns had at least one restaurant offering peanut soup, chicken satay and spicy noodles. Nasi goreng (fried rice) and bami goreng (fried noodles) were as well known to Dutch diners as chicken masala and naan bread were to the British. After centuries of trade with Indonesia, the Dutch had developed an abiding obsession with coffee, with an expensive coffee machine an essential feature of even the scruffiest student house. Surinamese food, which I’d never even heard of before moving to the Netherlands, was also popular. The Dutch had left their mark on the world, and the world had returned the favour.

We have increased our population to the level of 7 billion and beyond. We are well on our way toward 9 billion before our growth trend is likely to flatten. We live at high densities in many cities. We have penetrated, and we continue to penetrate, the last great forests and other wild ecosystems of the planet, disrupting the physical structures and the ecological communities of such places. We cut our way through the Congo. We cut our way through the Amazon. We cut our way through Borneo. We cut our way through Madagascar. We cut our way through New Guinea and northeastern Australia. We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out. We kill and butcher and eat many of the wild animals found there. We settle in those places, creating villages, work camps, towns, extractive industries, new cities. We bring in our domesticated animals, replacing the wild herbivores with livestock. We multiply our livestock as we've multiplied ourselves, operating huge factory-scale operations involving thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, and goats, not to mention hundreds of bamboo rats and palm civets, all confined en masse within pens and corrals, under conditions that allow those domestics and semidomestics to acquire infectious pathogens from external sources (such as bats roosting over the pig pens), to share those infections with one another, and to provide abundant opportunities for the pathogens to evolve new forms, some of which are capable of infecting a human as well as a cow or a duck. We treat many of those stock animals with prophylactic doses of antibiotics and other drugs, intended not to cure them but to foster their weight gain and maintain their health just sufficiently for profitable sale and slaughter, and in doing that we encourage the evolution of resistant bacteria. We export and import livestock across great distances and at high speeds. We export and import other live animals, especially primates, for medical research. We export and import wild animals as exotic pets. We export and import animal skins, contraband bushmeat, and plants, some of which carry secret microbial passengers. We travel, moving between cities and continents even more quickly than our transported livestock. We stay in hotels where strangers sneeze and vomit. We eat in restaurants where the cook may have butchered a porcupine before working on our scallops. We visit monkey temples in Asia, live markets in India, picturesque villages in South America, dusty archeological sites in New Mexico, dairy towns in the Netherlands, bat caves in East Africa, racetracks in Australia – breathing the air, feeding the animals, touching things, shaking hands with the friendly locals – and then we jump on our planes and fly home. We get bitten by mosquitoes and ticks. We alter the global climate with our carbon emissions, which may in turn alter the latitudinal ranges within which those mosquitoes and ticks live. We provide an irresistible opportunity for enterprising microbes by the ubiquity and abundance of our human bodies. Everything I’ve just mentioned is encompassed within this rubric: the ecology and evolutionary biology of zoonotic diseases. Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.

I popped my cassette of Alte Kameraden into the player. A friend had taped it for me. Alte Kameraden seven and one-half times. The Royal Netherlands Guardsmen. Music to enlist by. It got my adrenaline moving. By the time I reached Candi Yakozi’s street I was ready to fight thirty-two Royal Bengal tigers. I counted doorways from her address to the corner. I parked and walked up the alley to the back door of her garden apartment. I knocked lightly. The door opened instantly. Candi Yakozi was wearing a smile and spike heels and a white sharkskin blouse that came to a screeching halt something like fifteen inches north of her knees. It looked like that might be all.

THROUGHOUT 1941, THE officers and crew of the Arizona were caught up in an ever-escalating whirlwind. The air was filled with war tension that everyone from admirals to raw recruits could feel. Most traced the origins to the day Adolf Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, but Japan had been at war in the Pacific since its efforts to subjugate China in 1937. At the heart of the matter were natural resources. What Japan’s home islands lacked, Japan needed to find elsewhere. After France surrendered to Germany and Great Britain stood alone against the Axis threat, Japan took advantage of the collapse of French authority in Indochina to move south, seize more territory, and threaten the natural resources of the Netherlands East Indies.

Similar situations were reported from the Netherlands: some Romanian Jews with Dutch visas went directly to Israel via Vienna; others came to the Netherlands with a visa for a third country, often in Latin America; and some tried to stay in Holland.29 Although it is not clear which option Alfred and Cesarina S. or people in the reported cases from the Netherlands eventually chose—staying in the transit country, moving to another country, or making Aliyah after all—it is important to note that they possessed these different options once they had left Romania. As emigrants from the Eastern Bloc in the West, they were in a relatively comfortable position, since deportation back to socialist Eastern Europe was generally not an option for their host countries when bloc confrontation was at its peak.30 The guaranteed possibility of being received in Israel as Jews constituted an additional safety net against the danger of ending up lost in transit.

The First Industrial Revolution (1700s–1800s) Beginning in the UK in the 1700s, freeing people to be inventive and productive and providing them with capital led many societies to shift to new machine-based manufacturing processes, creating the first sustained and widespread period of productivity improvement in thousands of years. These improvements began with agricultural inventions that increased productivity, which led to a population boom and a secular shift toward urbanization as the labor intensity of farming declined. As people flocked to cities, industry benefited from the steadily increasing supply of labor, creating a virtuous cycle and leading to shifts in wealth and power both within and between nations. The new urban populations needed new types of goods and services, which required the government to get bigger and spend money on things like housing, sanitation, and education, as well as on the infrastructure for the new industrial capitalist system, such as courts, regulators, and central banks. Power moved into the hands of central government bureaucrats and the capitalists who controlled the means of production. Geopolitically, these developments most helped the UK, which pioneered many of the most important innovations. The UK caught up to the Netherlands in output per capita around 1800, before overtaking them in the mid-19th century, when the British Empire approached its peak share of world output (around 20 percent).

To a person of infamous character, the pompous Pharisee would be doubly contemptuous, and a woman conscious of unworthiness would be sorely wounded by his manners; besides, at a feast, her tears would be much out of place, and therefore she would be the more rudely rebuked; but how fearless she was, and how bravely she held her tongue when Simon railed! What will not men and women do when grace moves them to love, and love prompts them to courage! Ay, into the very jaws of hell the grace of God would make a believer dare to enter, if God commanded him. There is no mountain too high for a believing foot to scale, and no furnace too hot for a believing heart to bear. Let Rome and its amphitheatres, Piedmont and its snow, France and its galleys, Smithfield and its stakes, the Netherlands and their rivers of blood, all speak of what grace can do when once it reigns in the heart, what heroes it can make of the very weakest and most timid of God’s children, where it rules supreme.

International labor mobility What’s the problem? Increased levels of migration from poor to rich countries would provide substantial benefits for the poorest people in the world, as well as substantial increases in global economic output. However, almost all developed countries pose heavy restrictions on who can enter the country to work. Scale: Very large. Eighty-five percent of the global variation in earnings is due to location rather than other factors: the extremely poor are poor simply because they don’t live in an environment that enables them to be productive. Economists Michael Clemens, Claudio Montenegro, and Lant Pritchett have estimated what they call the place premium—the wage gain for foreign workers who move to the United States. For an average person in Haiti, relocation to the United States would increase income by about 680 percent; for a Nigerian, it would increase income by 1,000 percent. Some other developing countries have comparatively lower place premiums, but they are still high enough to dramatically benefit migrants. Most migrants would also earn enough to send remittances to family members, thus helping many of those who do not migrate. An estimated six hundred million people worldwide would migrate if they were able to. Several economists have estimated that the total economic gains from free mobility of labor across borders would be greater than a 50 percent increase in world GDP. Even if these estimates were extremely optimistic, the economic gains from substantially increased immigration would be measured in trillions of dollars per year. (I discuss some objections to increased levels of immigration in the endnotes.) Neglectedness: Very neglected. Though a number of organizations work on immigration issues, very few focus on the benefits to future migrants of relaxing migration policy, instead focusing on migrants who are currently living in the United States. Tractability: Not very tractable. Increased levels of immigration are incredibly unpopular in developed countries, with the majority of people in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom favoring reduced immigration. Among developed countries, Canada is most sympathetic to increased levels of immigration; but even there only 20 percent of people favor increasing immigration, while 42 percent favor reducing it. This makes political change on this issue in the near term seem unlikely. What promising organizations are working on it? ImmigrationWorks (accepts donations) organizes, represents, and advocates on behalf of small-business owners who would benefit from being able to hire lower-skill migrant workers more easily, with the aim of “bringing America’s annual legal intake of foreign workers more realistically into line with the country’s labor needs.” The Center for Global Development (accepts donations) conducts policy-relevant research and policy analysis on topics relevant to improving the lives of the global poor, including on immigration reform, then makes recommendations to policy makers.

When you’re from a small country like the Netherlands, you easily learn to speak other languages,” she’d said considerately. To this day, I do resort to English unless I’m really sure of the Greek words I’m using. I remember one early morning waiting on the Flying Dolphin to Athens, I’d closed my eyes briefly and opened them to see a Greek lady waiting to sit in the seat next to me. I quickly moved my handbag out of her seat and told her “Signome, eimai horismeni.” The lady looked at me with a very strange expression, sat in the seat and didn’t look my way or speak again. Well no wonder she doesn’t bother with me after I said that—what a dumb thing to say: “Excuse me, I’m tired.” Yet again I was embarrassed again at my lack of ability to communicate easily. “What exactly did you say?” Mia asked when I related the incident at our next Ladies’ Night. As soon as I repeated the words, everyone burst out laughing. “Pamela, kourasmini is the word for ‘tired’. What you told the woman was, “Excuse me, I’m divorced!

The vast majority of German troops invaded France, Belgium and the Netherlands on foot, with their supplies moved forward from the railheads in the classic nineteenth-century manner, by horse and cart.