The terms Moroccan-Dutch or Dutch-Moroccans refer to immigrants from Morocco to the Netherlands and their descendants. They are one of the larger immigrant groups, making up 10.4% of the country's total population of foreign background.
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Migration history
Moroccans were not much represented in the first major wave of migration to the Netherlands from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, which consisted mostly of people from the Netherlands' former colonies. However, they began to show up in large numbers during the second wave; between 1965 and 1973, one hundred thousand Turks and Moroccans came to the Netherlands, and a further 170,000 from 1974 to 1986. Earlier arrivals consisted of guest workers, whose recruitment and admission was governed by a bilateral treaty signed in 1969. However, the guests did not return home. From the 1970s, the number arriving under family reunification schemes became more significant. Around half originated from the mountainous Rif region.
Demographic characteristics
As of 2009, statistics of the Dutch Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek with regards to people of Moroccan origin showed:
For a total of 353,987 persons (176,647 men, 164,881). This represented roughly 51% growth over the 1996 total of 225,088 persons. The population has shown a year-on-year increase every year since then.
As of 2011, 16% of male youth under 25 years of age in Amsterdam is Dutch-Moroccan.
Culture
"I know my friends from the street," a 2002 Verweij-Jonker Institute report on leisure time of Dutch Turks and Dutch Moroccans, stated that Dutch Moroccans tend to make few new contacts from the street, tend to spend leisure time with members of the same ethnicity and sex, and have leisure activities heavily influenced by "Moroccan culture". Frank Buijs did a 1993 study of young Moroccan men in the Netherlands. He found that young men prefer attending "Moroccan parties" over other types of parties since they are able to meet other Moroccans and consider the parties to be "fun".
Trees Pels' 1982 literature study of Dutch-Turks and Dutch-Moroccans concluded that, of both groups, due to socio-cultural factors, girls "infrequently" participated in leisure activities.
In the 1990s, several organizations were established to encourage and promote Dutch Moroccan cultural productions. In 1996 Hassan Housetta concluded that the Dutch Moroccan community received little support from the Dutch government in some of its artistic and cultural expressions. Bousetta concluded that, in the words of Miriam Gazzah, author of "Rhythms and Rhymes of Life: Music and Identification Processes of Dutch-Moroccan Youth," "the state's policy aimed at political emancipation of Moroccans obstructed rather than promoted the production of new or innovative cultural and artistic developments."
LGBT-related attitudes
Laurens Buijs, Gert Hekma, and Jan Willem Duyvendak, authors of the 2011 article "‘As long as they keep away from me’: The paradox of antigay violence in a gay-friendly country," explained that members of three ethnic groups, Dutch-Moroccans, Dutch-Antilleans, and Dutch-Turks, "are less accepting towards homosexuality, also when controlled for gender, age, level of education and religiosity." Police files state that perpetrators of anti-gay violence in Amsterdam are as often Dutch as they are Dutch-Moroccan, and Buijs et al. said Dutch-Moroccans "are over-represented as suspects" because 16% of male youth under 25 are Dutch-Moroccan compared to 39% of male youth under 25 being native Dutch. The Party for Freedom (PVV) had stated that "The perpetrators of antigay violence in the big cities are almost always Muslims, almost always Moroccans." Buijs et al. say that overrepresentation of Dutch-Moroccans in statistics of antigay violence recorded by Dutch police is "more likely the result of their low social-economic position, combined with the fact that their family networks are less tight, and their upbringing less strict, than for example those of Dutch-Turks." Buijs et al. say that the lack of tight family networks and the more lax upbringing "draws the Dutch-Moroccans, more often than youngsters from other groups, away from their homes and schools to public spaces, where they learn to live according to the tough and hyper-masculine codes of the culture of the street."