Nuisance-causing asylum seekers from safe countries must be spread to other municipalities as quickly as possible. The cabinet wants to relieve the pressure at the reception location in Ter Apel. Safelanders who stay there regularly cause nuisance in Drenthe. A new letter from the cabinet will follow next week about the asylum approach.
Outgoing State Secretary Eric van der Burg (VVD) already made a number of commitments at the end of April to reduce the nuisance caused by safelanders. The application procedure for this group would be processed more quickly and the proportion of safelanders staying in Ter Apel would be reduced in terms of numbers. But in practice, nothing came of those promises in the following months.
“On April 24, an agreement was made to devise a system that will allow those guests to go through the procedure more quickly. Take between five and eight days,” says Mayor Eric van Oosterhout of Emmen in the Radio Drenthe program. Cassata. “They then hear that they have no right to stay here and can be put on the train.”
In April, Van Oosterhout fully understood that the cabinet would need time to implement the plans. “Even though we were already completely done with the situation, I, like my fellow mayor of the municipality of Westerwolde, went home in good spirits. The idea was that it would be arranged by the summer holidays.”
So that turned out differently. Dissatisfaction in the municipalities of Westerwolde and Emmen about this grew and Van der Burg recently visited the region again. After that visit, the State Secretary sent a letter to both municipalities. According to Van Oosterhout, Van der Burg wrote that the safelanders must be spread to other municipalities in the country as quickly as possible.
“He let us know that we are absolutely right,” said the Emmer mayor. “There are almost 2,000 people in Ter Apel and we call about 150 to 200 of those people safe landers. Prevent this group from remaining in the procedure for months, because experience shows that some will then take to the streets and mess around in New York, for example. -Weerdinge, Weerdinge and Emmen.”
For Westerwolde, the letter is ‘too unclear and in parts not ambitious enough’. Emmen agrees with the position of its Groningen neighbors. A new letter will follow from The Hague in response next week with stricter measures. “This is mainly about the fact that a large number of those safelanders also have to go to other places in the Netherlands,” says Van Oosterhout. “In a country of 17 million inhabitants, we have a relatively small asylum reception problem, but there is a limit if you do everything in the Ter Apel-Emmen corner.”
“It makes a big difference whether there are 150 safelanders in Ter Apel or 15. It is up to the State Secretary to fulfill what he promised,” says Van Oosterhout. “We are waiting for the letter, but especially for the response from other municipalities. We simply need other municipalities to solve part of the problem.”
“For example, look at my colleague Marco Out in Assen, I have a lot of admiration for him. In that municipality, an entire hall has been made available where some of those guests are also accommodated,” Van Oosterhout refers to the Expo Hall. “They also do that in Zwolle, but we have 342 municipalities in the Netherlands. And among them there are municipalities that have enough space to solve this.”
Watch the conversation with Van Oosterhout in Cassata about the distribution of safelanders: