Just three weeks ago, Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, called the refugee policies of countries such as Poland and Hungary – policies marked by violence, humiliation and barbed-wire walls – an “unfeeling disregard for life.” ‘. He said: ‘What is happening at Europe’s borders is legally and morally unacceptable and must stop.’
Three days later, Russia invaded Ukraine, triggering the largest European refugee influx since World War II. On paper, that was a recipe for misery: millions of war refugees who suddenly depend on anti-migration governments on their way to safety. Only, Russian President Putin did not cause a refugee crisis, as he may have hoped, but the exact opposite.
Unthinkable unanimity
Putin caused a until recently unimaginable unanimity within the EU on one of the most explosive dossiers of all: asylum reception. Hungary immediately opened its borders, Poland welcomed 1.2 million refugees in a few weeks (the UNHCR is expecting an exodus of 4 million refugees in total) and for the first time in the history of the EU, a law was actually activated banning refugees. from Ukraine immediately grants a temporary residence permit. As a result, they have an equal right to things such as housing, financial assistance, care and education.
The Netherlands also took part in this European turnaround. Not only did the responsible VVD State Secretary Eric van der Burg prefer not to use the word ‘lucky seekers’, because ‘every person is a fortune seeker’. He also said: ‘If soon there will be 50 thousand Ukrainians here and number 50,001 comes in, we will not say: you can sleep outside.’ Compare that with his predecessor Ankie Broekers-Knol. A year and a half ago, after much ado about the exact numbers, she was prepared to take over a maximum of one hundred asylum seekers from the burned-out reception camp Moria on the Greek island of Lesbos, provided that in return one hundred fewer refugees would come to the Netherlands through the UNHCR resettlement program. .
The region, that’s us
‘Firstly, with these kinds of statements, Van der Burg shows that we can talk respectfully about refugees, which I think is a fantastic development,’ says Thea Hilhorst, professor of Humanitarian Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam. ‘But what I mainly get from his message is that the Netherlands has always said that you should receive refugees in their own region and that this time we are the region.’
The only question is: what exactly will this have consequences for that region? After all, if you look at previous European migration crises, you will almost always see cracks appearing in the united hospitality of the beginning. Positive attention for refugees usually disappears before the refugees themselves have left.
How solidarity will Italy and Greece, for example, show if Poland and Hungary, hitherto adamantly against any redistribution of boat refugees across the rest of Europe, will urge other countries to take in refugees because their own systems are overflowing? And how will the Dutch react if it turns out that the housing market will become even tighter as soon as thousands of Ukrainian families are allocated social housing? Moreover, how inconceivable are racist incidents in a country where a party previously set up a Poland hotline?
Recoil
‘When about 40,000 refugees came to the Netherlands during the Yugoslavia war, you saw this kind of backlash after a while,’ says Marlou Schrover, professor of Migration History at Leiden University. ‘At the beginning there was also an enormous willingness to take people in or to donate during fund-raising campaigns. After a while the first swastikas appeared at the reception center in Terneuzen, the first hikers drove through the streets with banners with slogans that there is no place for asylum seekers in the village, and so on.’
More recently, the same has happened on a number of Greek islands. The first groups of war refugees from Syria still made a deep impression on the residents, who started collecting food and blankets in large numbers and turned empty buildings into shelters. But with the fourth, fifth, and later the tenth and twentieth groups, a certain irritation crept into the community on almost all the islands. Demonstrations became more and more extensive, left-wing mayors were gradually replaced by more right-wing colleagues, aid organizations were opposed until politicians decided to just push the boats at sea back to where they came from.
Bottlenecks
‘This time too I hold my breath in that regard’, says Eduard Nazarski, former director of the Dutch Council for Refugees and Amnesty International Netherlands. ‘We have now arranged temporary locations all over Europe, but where will we house everyone if the war turns out to be much longer? And how do you organize the psychological and medical support that war refugees need? Let’s just say that the care and housing market are just two sectors where things are really tight in the Netherlands.’
In that respect, the current unanimity in hospitality is perhaps comparable to the unanimity with which the Dutch opened their balcony doors exactly two years ago and decided to applaud healthcare. After all, the easiest moment to be a good people is the moment just before the first sacrifices have to be made.