Asylum Min. demands answers from municipalities with no, too few asylum shelters

From next week, Minister Bart van den Brink of Asylum and Migration will start reprimanding municipalities that are not accommodating enough asylum seekers. He will summon those municipalities to his Ministry to explain why they are not adhering to the Asylum Distribution Act, NOS reports.

The Asylum Distribution Act was implemented in 2024 and allows the central government to force municipalities to take in a fair share of asylum seekers. The law stipulates how many asylum seekers a municipality needs to accommodate based on various factors, including population size. The accommodation must be in place by the end of this year.

Currently, only 92 of the 342 Dutch municipalities are meeting the target set by the Asylum Distribution Act. And several municipalities are doing way more than their share.

For example, the municipality of Westerwolde, which covers the asylum registration center in Ter Apel, must accommodate 124 asylum seekers, according to the law. Westerwolde currently has room for 2,279 asylum seekers.

The nearby Stadskanaal, which again provided beds for people for whom there was no space in Ter Apel earlier this week, is also doing more than strictly necessary. The law states Stadskanaal must have 127 places starting next year. The municipality can currently accommodate 472 people.

But there are also 250 municipalities doing too little or even nothing at all. For example, Groningen is supposed to accommodate 898 asylum seekers, but barely has half those beds available. Tilburg still needs to create 728 reception places. In total, municipalities still need to create over 40,000 reception places before the end of this year.

Many mayors say they are doing their best. Locals often oppose plans to shelter asylum seekers, and several municipalities have faced protests and riots again in recent weeks.

Some municipalities are also working on emergency reception places, but not any long-term accommodations. According to the Ministry, this is insufficient in many cases. Long-term shelters are much cheaper, and having a sufficient number of those would make the often expensive and substandard emergency accommodation unnecessary.