After months of threats, the government is now putting its words into action. For the first time, a municipality is forced to receive asylum seekers. The Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA) has purchased Landhotel ‘t Elshuys in Albergen, in the Overijssel municipality of Tubbergen, and thinks it can realize 300 reception places here. Because it has not been possible to reach an ‘administrative agreement’ with the municipality since April, the government is now taking over the licensing process. This means that it no longer depends on the willingness of a municipality.
From the letter with which State Secretary Eric van der Burg (Asylum and Migration, VVD) reported this Tuesday to the House of Representatives, also on behalf of Minister Hugo de Jonge (Public Housing, CDA), expresses increasing despair. ‘The need is very great. Without measures, we will be short of thousands of shelters in October’, the letter states, which also announces that more municipal authorities are waiting for this appeal to environmental law. This is not counting the bill that is being drafted, which will soon be able to force all 344 Dutch municipalities to contribute to asylum reception.
With this first step, the government is taking two major risks. Even those who are not a lawyer can predict that sooner or later a municipality will go to court to have the legitimacy of the instrument used tested. ‘COA is currently preparing an application for an environmental permit for this location’, the ministers write about Tubbergen. They will then assign it themselves. That is rightly, in their own words, ‘an exceptional step’. On the other hand, the cabinet is also aware that a lawsuit from the Council for Refugees is looming over the market and that everything must be done to curb the reception shortage (a ‘national crisis’ since June).
With that depends the second sore point together. Support for the reception of asylum seekers is fragile in many places. In close-knit communities such as Tubbergen, many residents do not see why they should be the solution to the harrowing scenes in Ter Apel. It is also not lost on them that at least one third of the asylum seekers will never be granted a residence status, because they do not appear to be refugees after an assessment by the immigration service. Nevertheless, this does not relieve the Netherlands of its obligation to provide decent reception. The move by the government may be undesirable, but it is unavoidable at the moment.
The position of the newspaper is expressed in the Volkskrant Commentaar. It is created after a discussion between the commentators and the editor-in-chief.