Refugee orgs., others invovled very critical of Dutch government's leaked asylum plans
The Cabinet plans for asylum that leaked to the press on Wednesday prompted very critical reactions from asylum lawyers, the Dutch Council for Refugees, and others involved in the asylum system.
The leaked concept letter by Prime Minister Dick Schoof on the “emergency asylum measures act” said that the government wouldn’t bypass parliament by declaring an asylum crisis, but would take several far-reaching measures. These include scrapping the Asylum Distribution Law “this year if possible,” declaring parts of Syria as “safe,” not allowing family reunification for unmarried partners, reintroducing border controls, and capping the refugee residency permit at three years, among other things.
The scrapping of the Asylum Distribution Act, which forces municipalities to take in their fair share of asylum seekers, will not help the structurally overcrowded asylum registration center in Ter Apel, said a spokesperson for Mayor Jaap Velema of Westerwolde, the municipality that covers Ter Apel.
“We see that there is currently little inflow, but there are problems with the outflow,” the spokesperson told NOS. “We do not see how the announced measures regarding the withdrawal of the distribution law and the regulation regarding the housing of refugees will improve the current situation in Ter Apel. An invitation has already been sent to the Minister to discuss how she is going to improve the situation in Ter Apel in the short term.”
The plans filled the refugees’ organization Vluchtelingenwerk Nederland with despair. “The government is deliberately trying to disrupt the asylum system,” chairman Frank Candel said. “The government wants to restrict the rights of recognized refugees, which places them in a vacuum. At the same time, they want people to work, but to work you need to know the language and have a place to live. If you take away all possibilities, the chance that they will find work is very small.”
According to Candel, the government is depriving refugees of “any prospect of participation in society” with these measures. “I also have to see which municipality wants to make places where people without prospects stay. You organize ghettos in this way. At the moment, refugees are linked to a city or village. If you let that go, people are literally hanging in no man’s land.”
Maartje Terpstra of the Association of Asylum Lawyers is particularly surprised by the measure to not allow unmarried partners to reunite with their loved one who received asylum in the Netherlands. “Especially because we have always done that for the LGBTQIA+ community,” she told NPO Radio 1 program Nieus & Co. “They flee precisely because they are persecuted and often cannot get married.”
She also found it striking that refugees won’t be allowed to refuse assigned housing. “That would then be housing that is not actually intended for Dutch people. The most worrying about that is that they won’t integrate easily because they have to stay together. Then it is more difficult to learn the Dutch language and to find work. So this does not solve anything. It creates problems.”
The border controls the government wants to introduce from the end of November could also be counterproductive, Terpstra said. “For asylum seekers, this usually means that they have to call in human traffickers. It also encourages ethnic profiling, which is something you want to prevent.”
