Odoorn, Ruinen, Ede, Leusden, Putten, Noordoostpolder, Markelo, Nijeveen, Oisterwijk. A messenger delivers a letter to all eight mayors on a Saturday. Whether they can report to the Torentje on Monday. There, the prime minister announces “ice cold” that an asylum seekers center will be opened in their municipality.
The operation is called ‘Place first, then talk’. “Governments should not treat each other like this,” responds mayor Yvo Kortmann. When he returns from The Hague to Oisterwijk, the first bus with asylum seekers has just arrived. It’s 1990.
Since then, a similar scenario has been repeated every few years: the number of reception places turns out to be too small for the number of asylum seekers. The Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA), which is paid per filled bed and scales down if there are fewer asylum seekers, has to look for new locations for asylum seekers’ centers when there is an influx. Municipalities do not want to cooperate, the cabinet is forcing. The mayor feels ambushed and pushed aside, residents are angry.
This week was no different: State Secretary for Asylum, Eric van der Burg (VVD), took over the permit granting of the Twente municipality of Tubbergen on Tuesday evening. For example, the zoning plan of a hotel in the village of Albergen can be adjusted to establish an asylum seekers’ center there. The college had said ‘time and again ‘we don’t want that’”, said Van der Burg.
Wrote to the House of Representatives the State Secretary about his means of coercion: “In this way, the central government is not bound by the willingness of municipalities to open a COA location.” Moreover, this was only “a first step,” he wrote. “Multiple locations in other municipalities will follow.”
Also read: How the government can force the municipality of Tubbergen to provide asylum
Dutch Lampedusa
The current reception crisis is an acute one. In Ter Apel, the only center where a new asylum seeker can and must register, asylum seekers have been sleeping outside for months. As early as April, the mayor of Groningen compared the situation with the Italian island of Lampedusa, infamous for its poor living conditions. Fighting broke out between asylum seekers in Ter Apel in recent days.
But it goes much further than one bottleneck: the whole chain is stuck. Because there are no homes for status holders – with a residence permit – due to the national housing shortage, 15,000 of them are still in an asylum seekers’ center. In places where asylum seekers should actually be received. COA estimates that 16,000 places should be added before the end of the year. Earlier this week it turned out that almost two thirds of the security regions have not arranged the agreed number.
That is why crisis shelters are arranged. But those locations (empty schools, barracks, offices and holiday homes) are also used for the reception of Ukrainian refugees. Moreover, says Vluchtelingenwerk Nederland, they do not meet the legal minimum requirements: they lack sanitary facilities, beds, privacy, decent food and protection. The foundation instituted summary proceedings against the central government and the COA. At the same time, the chairman of the Security Council, Hubert Bruls, informed the cabinet that municipalities will stop organizing emergency shelter from 1 October: “We are helping the central government with what they have not organized themselves.”
The State Secretary has another month and a half to find a solution. “It is no longer possible on a voluntary basis,” he said on Wednesday. He opted for a means of coercion that has been around since 2015, the ‘spatial planning instruments’. That did not cause widespread commotion at the time; it is used, for example, in the construction of a waste incinerator and gives the government the power to overrule a municipality ‘when carrying out a project of national importance’.
At first sight, this crisis appears to be comparable to other instances of friction between The Hague and local authorities. Such as the implementation of youth care by municipalities, or the nitrogen crisis that the cabinet has placed with the provinces.
That’s optical illusion. Because asylum is no decentralized task, but a national authority. The COA does not need permission from a municipal council to accommodate asylum seekers. The consequences are for the mayor: angry residents, afraid of nuisance or change. In Albergen demonstrators stood every evening in front of the hotel purchased by the COA. They did not demonstrate at the town hall. A conversation there with the mayor had left the local residents “a very good feeling”. Neighbor Ben Boerrigter initially felt quite cheated by the municipality. “But I now believe that they too are really overruled,” he says.
Also read: ‘People are afraid’, hear the Syrian refugees in the Tubberg hotel
Mayor Wilmien Haverkamp-Wenker says that Tubbergen has not been offered an alternative. She finds three hundred asylum seekers out of almost 3,600 inhabitants. “Look at the scale of the municipality,” she said on Wednesday. Alderman Ursula Bekhuis-Groothuis (Municipality Interests, VVD) said that Tubbergen receives a few dozen Ukrainians, has crisis shelters and wanted to accommodate “a maximum of twenty status holders” in the hotel.
This attitude, which can also be heard in other ‘refusal municipalities’, again arouses resentment among municipalities that do receive asylum seekers and do not just create temporary places. Jaap Velema, mayor of Westerwolde, which includes Ter Apel, said against RTV Noord that his colleagues also have to “deliver up front, they don’t do that. This is a problem of my negligent fellow municipalities.” For weeks, regional consultations have warned against coercion from the central government. Municipalities that do receive asylum seekers believe that ‘refusing municipalities’ should therefore not be surprised.
Van der Burg is meanwhile working on a bill to oblige all municipalities to receive asylum seekers via a provincial distribution key. He expects to send that to the House of Representatives after the summer. The law should come into effect in January.
In Oisterwijk, which felt attacked by the government in 1990, the municipal council recently extended the asylum seekers’ center contract for another thirty years.
With the cooperation of Marit Willemsen