The Best Immigrant - First Episode

When a Flemish right-wing party wins the elections with an absolute majority, all residents born outside Flanders are expelled. However, a select few get the chance to win a Flemish passport through The Best Immigrant. Our own people first, asylum seekers out, no foreigners on our street... Today, this is the daily fare on many internet forums. Some still sugarcoat it a bit, while others are very radical. For the mentors of these ideas, the so-called Wilders, Van Griekens, and other De Winters, the idea of a series like The Best Immigrant must be a very wet dream.

However, that wet dream might turn into a nightmare because the confrontation with the concept, as portrayed in the first episode of The Best Immigrant, is quite stark. It evokes memories of the events between 1935 and 1945, where certain population groups were rounded up and placed in camps without any form of trial. Fortunately, this is just fiction, you might think, but you have to wonder how far we are from such situations if a certain political faction were to seize all power.

The Best Immigrant begins with the victory of the far-right party VPV in Flanders, achieving an absolute majority. As a result, Flanders secedes, and Belgium ceases to exist. The next step taken by the new government is to expel all people not born in Flanders, with the exception of other Europeans and residents from the United States and Canada.

They have succeeded in making that first episode a gripping piece of television that really hits hard.

Everyone affected by this regulation is apprehended and transferred to detention centers. There, they must stay until they are repatriated to their country of origin. One of these people is the Dutch teacher Mona (Jennifer Heylen), who was adopted as a baby shortly after her birth in Somalia. Mona is also a well-known activist advocating for women in her birth country, where female genital mutilation is still performed daily.

The stipulation that people not born in Flanders are expelled also means that mixed families, where one of the spouses is born abroad, are effectively separated. The same goes for grandparents born abroad who have to leave behind their offspring born in Flanders.

However, a television station sees an opportunity in this frenzy and launches a program where the winner receives a Flemish passport. Mona and her boyfriend are approached to participate in this program, and after much hesitation and some persuasion from her boyfriend, she signs the contract for the show, The Best Immigrant.



The first episode of this series also concludes with the first round of the game show, where participants are mainly tested on their knowledge of the Dutch language. And those who answer incorrectly are irrevocably sent back to their country of origin.

The Best Immigrant clearly aims to provoke and will be perceived as very extreme even by many right-leaning viewers. The way people are apprehended and detained, how they are treated during their stay, and what happens if they try to escape. The participants in the game show might hope to stay, but at the end of the journey, there will only be one winner, and even in that first round, you can already see that for some participants, it's every man for himself.

When the first trailers were released, there was a lot of commentary on social media. Both positive and negative voices were heard. But ultimately, you just have to immerse yourself in that first episode and perhaps later in the entire series of five episodes before making a final judgment. The subject of this series will spark a lot of controversy, but the makers of The Best Immigrant aim to make a clear statement and have succeeded in creating a compelling piece of television with that first episode that hits hard.