Ukrainians who have fled to the Netherlands and who have paid work must pay rent and health insurance premiums from 2027. From then on, they will receive a special refugee status for three years that prepares them for voluntary return. The cabinet announced this on Friday decided.
There are currently 135,000 Ukrainians in the Netherlands who fled after the Russian invasion in February 2022. Due to special European rules, they do not have to apply for asylum, unlike other war refugees. This means they can work immediately and have the right to housing, healthcare and education. But that special arrangement expires in March 2027; After that, the European Commission believes, the reception of Ukrainian refugees is a matter for individual Member States.
The outgoing cabinet opted on Friday to give Ukrainians a special status from then on. This prevents them all from having to submit a separate asylum application to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND), which is already overloaded. Nearly two-thirds of Ukrainian refugees have paid work. That is why outgoing minister Mona Keijzer (Asylum, BBB) believes that they should pay their own rent and care. She thus wants to “normalize the level of facilities for displaced persons during their stay in the Netherlands,” she wrote in a letter to the House of Representatives on Friday.
Part of this is also that Ukrainians have to go to ‘normal’ housing more often, according to Keijzer. Now almost three-quarters of them are in municipal shelters, for which they pay an income-related contribution. These reception locations are now almost completely full, she writes in the letter. She wants to discuss this with municipalities and housing associations. She wants to investigate, among other things, whether these reception locations can be converted into ‘regular’ housing that should be made “as much as possible available to other target groups, such as students, emergency seekers or others” after the departure of Ukrainians. Earlier this week it emerged that compared to starters, one in five social housing units would be allocated to status holders in 2023.
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