The municipality of Westland does not plan to implement the dispersal law if it is adopted by the Senate on Tuesday. Omroep West writes Tuesday that the South Holland municipality is obliged by law to receive seven hundred asylum seekers, but that the majority of the municipal factions are digging in their heels. “We will not allow anything to be imposed on us,” the local broadcaster quotes, for example, the group leader of GemeenteBelang Westland, Remmert Keizer.
The attitude of the municipality of Westland (more than 115,000 inhabitants) cannot be called surprising. In recent years, she has repeatedly shown reservations about politically sensitive decisions. The last time the municipality received asylum seekers was in 2010. This made Westland the only one of the fifty largest municipalities in the Netherlands that did not help to relieve Ter Apel in recent years. The municipality also worked for years — ultimately in vain — against the arrival of an Islamic school.
Under the distribution law, which distributes the reception of asylum seekers proportionally among municipalities, Westland would have to receive around seven hundred asylum seekers. “How?”, VVD Westland faction leader Guus Bakker asks Omroep West. “We cannot even house our own young, elderly and migrant workers.”
Neither support nor space
According to Keizer, there is a lack of support and space in Westland for the reception of approximately seven hundred asylum seekers. The population density of Westland is relatively high at 1,432 inhabitants per square kilometer. For comparison: according to CBS, 6,827 people live per square kilometer in the municipality of The Hague and 273 in the municipality of Venray.
The Westland municipal council has repeatedly stopped new housing projects in recent years, sometimes under heavy social pressure. There were no extra beds for migrant workers, even though the municipality relies on them economically. There was also resistance to the arrival of a new construction project and to large numbers of social housing. On the other hand, about a thousand Ukrainians were welcome shortly after the Russian invasion. “The color does matter,” PvdA faction leader Nico de Gier said earlier. NRC.
The Association of Dutch Municipalities said otherwise in a telephone response NRC not having heard any concrete comparable sounds from other municipalities. “But we have not yet made an inventory, because the distribution law still has to be voted on,” said a spokesperson. “A distribution decision will not be made until the end of this year.” Municipalities then have another six months to find a suitable reception location. If that is not possible, the State Secretary can designate places in mid-2025.
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Asylum seekers are no longer welcome in the South Holland Westland