Can and should a cost-benefit analysis of immigration be made? That is the question currently up for debate in Dutch parliament and society.

Before summer recess a parliamentarian for Geert Wilders’ anti-Islam Party for Freedom (PVV) sent questions to all 12 Dutch ministries asking them to list the costs of (non-western) immigrants and their offspring to society. The PVV wanted to know how much taxes immigrants pay, how often they go the doctor’s and what percentage of police interventions is related to immigrants. But it also demanded to know, for instance, how many drivers stuck in traffic jams throughout the Netherlands are immigrants.

This week the cabinet provided answers to some of the PVV’s questions, but it refused to answer others. Not only because it couldn’t – in many areas of government ethnicity plays no role and no statistics are kept – but because “we don’t keep records of the value of people,” as integration minister Eberhard van der Laan said.

American author Christopher Caldwell recently wrote a book about European immigration and in an interview with NRC Handelsblad he said: “The question about the economic cost of immigration is entirely legitimate. The justification for [the] mass immigration [of the seventies] was economic too: Europe’s industry needed guest workers. You can’t argue that immigration is necessary on economic grounds and then not look at the economic effects.”

What do you think? Should a cost-benefit analysis of non-Western immigration in the Netherlands, and other countries, be made? Or should the government stick to its political stand that it will not put a figure on the value of people just because the anti-immigrant party asks it to?