Leiderdorp receives a hundred unaccompanied male asylum seekers in a church building. Isn’t that asking for trouble? No, no one is protesting. “If we can contribute like that, why not?”
To be fair, the building itself is quite ugly. As if the architect had a plan when he started, but had no idea how to end. So I decided to turn that pile of yellow bricks into a huge tower. And then it is also located on an unimaginative furniture boulevard in Leiderdorp, opposite the flagship stores of Swiss Sense and Beter Bed.
But when you bring it up to the new residents of the church, they just shrug their shoulders with a smile. No, they say. It’s fine here. ‘We feel good here, the people are nice’, says Hakimi, a Syrian who has been living here for a week, after having spent three days in Ter Apel. ‘It’s a little boring at the most, but that’s okay. Do you know if there is a supermarket near here? And how can I log in to the hospital’s Wi-Fi?’
Relieving Ter Apel
Earlier this month, the municipality of Leiderdorp decided to receive a hundred unaccompanied male asylum seekers from unsafe countries in the virtually empty Power City Church on the outskirts of the village. In doing so, the mayor was responding to the request of the Hollands Midden security region to temporarily receive at least 450 asylum seekers spread over several municipalities in order to relieve the overcrowded application center in Ter Apel.
A hundred men traveling alone on the edge of a residential area – you could see a recipe for misery there. After all, anyone who bases his reality on Facebook messages and newspaper headlines alone might think that the Netherlands is an intolerant country, where every village goes into an uncontrolled frenzy as soon as a few strangers ask for help.
It is not without reason that the cabinet, despite the sometimes abominable conditions in Ter Apel, again failed to agree on a law that should spread the reception of asylum seekers better across the Netherlands. The VVD in particular refuses to oblige municipalities to provide shelter, even if this is only temporary.
Hardly any resistance
But the example of Leiderdorp proves that politicians are not always perfectly able to estimate how their citizens think. In order to avoid any opposition, mayor Laila Driessen (VVD) decided not to take the decision about the arrival of the temporary crisis shelter lightly, but asked the city council to elect it. It also gave citizens the opportunity to speak during a public council meeting, several letters were sent to local residents, an explanation was published in the door-to-door paper, a walk-in evening was organized and a special web page was set up with even more information.
The resistance was largely absent. At the public council meeting there was finally one written response from outside; all parties unanimously voted in favor of the plan to cooperate, and on the open evening two weeks ago, only thirty visitors turned out, some of whom also came to volunteer.
‘We had read somewhere that they were coming’, say Erwin and Lotte, two thirty-somethings who live in the residential area next to the Power City Church, ‘but to be honest it doesn’t really matter to us. If we can contribute like that, why not?’
‘There is no one who flees from his country without good reason’, says Jamal (43), a neighbor who, like Erwin and Lotte, prefers not to use his last name in the newspaper. “If you’re a little willing to accept them and see through all the fear you might feel from following the media, you’ll see that there’s plenty of room left for everyone.”
‘Completely fine’
‘In reality things are going really well in many places,’ says Jan Scholten of the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA). The problem is that citizen protests such as those in Hardenberg, Harskamp and Albergen are more visible than the many dozens of open evenings that have been organized in village houses and town halls in recent months, and which usually went off in a friendly manner. As a result, many people have the impression that the asylum crisis covers the whole of the Netherlands. ‘But I honestly think that 97 percent of the Dutch are just trying to make the best of it.’
Not that there is never unrest in Leiderdorp, a municipality of 27,000 inhabitants that is glued to Leiden. In 2016, when there were plans for a shelter for 350 asylum seekers in the former ROC, three more members of the so-called Identitair Resistance action group climbed on a roof to hang banners with texts such as ‘Close the borders’. But even then the majority of the inhabitants understood that the three roof climbers did not exactly represent the majority.
‘I didn’t know that there would be a hundred asylum seekers, but hey, that’s totally fine,’ says Anne-Marie Doria (50), who lives a few hundred meters from the Power City Church. “Sure, there are plenty of problems here. I also find it difficult that my children cannot find a home. Or that they all have their families come over, so that relationships may soon be lost. And I really hope they are well supervised. Because when you emigrate, it is important that you adapt. But in the end we are all human, right? And if we were to experience something like them, wouldn’t we want to be helped too?’