The deadlines are piling up: if the government has not arranged enough reception places for asylum seekers by 1 August, the Dutch Council for Refugees will go to court. As of 1 October, the 25 security regions will stop looking for emergency shelters, chairman Hubert Bruls announced on Tuesday. The lack of places for asylum seekers, who now sleep several hundred a night outside the overcrowded application center Ter Apel, is becoming more poignant by the day. And if nothing changes, there will still be 14,000 places short this year.
Some regions do more than others to relieve Ter Apel. The municipalities of Oss, Nijmegen, Alkmaar, Voorschoten and Wolfheze, for example, have opened emergency shelter locations – in Van der Valk hotels, sports halls and vacant mental health institutions. In turn, the Noordoostpolder municipality was told two weeks ago that it will have a ‘second registration center’, a mini-Ter Apel, next to the current asylum seekers’ center in the village of Luttelgeest. It is not yet clear whether the city council will agree.
None of this would have been necessary if the judiciary had not closed asylum seekers’ centers at a rapid pace. In 2016, there were still 113 in the Netherlands and now 72. The Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA) receives compensation from the Ministry of Justice – per bed slept in. So vacancy costs money. A small buffer is therefore expensive. Fewer asylum seekers? Close beds. As if, after the low points in the Syrian war in 2015, fewer people would forever flee to the Netherlands. Admittedly, no one expected Ukrainian refugees, but they fall outside the COA’s system. They are accommodated in private homes and vacant nursing homes, hotels, holiday parks and offices.
There is another crisis that does not help: the housing crisis. As a result, there are hundreds of candidates for every vacant rental property. In the city of Utrecht, people wait an average of eleven years for social housing – hence the angry reactions to the priority status holders will be given this summer. Normally, 30 percent of social rent across the country is reserved for ‘urgents’, including status holders. But that seems insufficient because the flow from asylum seekers’ centers has come to a complete standstill.
State Secretary Eric van der Burg (VVD, Asylum Affairs) and the security regions agree that the conditions in Ter Apel, but also in some emergency locations, should not remain this way for a day longer. A month ago, the Inspectorates for Healthcare and Justice and Security described in a letter to Van der Burg that 8,801 accompanied children and 1,450 unaccompanied minors are staying in reception centers where “the quality of life is substandard” and “the rights and safety are not guaranteed.” ”. In April, Mayor Koen Schuiling of Groningen reported after a visit to Ter Apel that “children play among the waste. There is a sewage smell in the shelters and urinals are full. There is zero privacy and it is a fire hazard. A festival site has better facilities.”
A long-term strategy is urgently needed because the number of people fleeing to Europe will not decrease for the foreseeable future. To start with, the IND must separate ‘promising and underprivileged’ asylum seekers much faster than at present, advised the Public Administration Council and the Advisory Committee on Immigration Affairs in June. Asylum seekers from safe countries such as Morocco and Algeria, for example, are rejected for 95 percent after the asylum procedure, which sometimes takes up to two years. They hang around for a long time in asylum seekers’ centers and some cause considerable nuisance. They are not allowed to work. This nuisance in turn reduces support among municipalities to open more asylum seekers’ centres.
According to the same advice, municipalities should be legally obliged to accept and guide ‘promising’ asylum seekers. Van der Burg is preparing such a law, which will force municipalities. According to the advice, the government should also pay for an ‘iron stock’ of reception places that does not keep pace with the number of incoming asylum seekers.
There is great resistance in some municipalities, chairman Bruls said on Monday. This is understandable when one sees the nuisance in Ter Apel from ‘safe landers’. And if one considers how many tasks municipalities have been tasked with since 2015 without associated budgets: youth care, parts of care for the elderly and youth psychiatry.
Yet every municipality will now have to take action, the government will have to help and pay. And for heaven’s sake, quickly make policy for the long term.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of July 23, 2022