The shocking reality of the Dutch asylum crisis
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In 2022, the Netherlands approved eighty-five percent of asylum applications.
Not only is this the highest rate in Europe, much higher than the EU average of forty-nine percent, it is a huge increase from only a few years ago.
Estimates suggest that 70,000 new asylum seekers will arrive this year, an amount three times higher than the Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND) has said that it can handle, and far beyond the country’s capacity to shelter.
Many of the temporary accommodations set up in cruise ships and convention centers after last summer’s influx crisis — when hundreds of refugees were forced to sleep outside the Ter Apel reception center — will be shut down in the coming months.
And the living situation inside existing emergency shelters is deteriorating. Asylum seekers have gone on hunger strikes; the education and psychological development of children is at risk; and three thousand people have been waiting for more than 15 months for a decision.
Often the way the government, and sometimes the media, frame this issue is around slowing the “influx.” Something like: there are too many people; we can’t handle those we have; people need to stop showing up.
And that’s not going to happen.
But first: what makes the acceptance rate in the Netherlands so high?
100 million displaced people worldwide
In 2022, war, persecution, and environmental disasters displaced more people than ever before.
Ten countries — Syria, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ukraine, Colombia, Ethiopia, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia and Sudan — account for almost three quarters of all displaced people.
Refugees tend to seek asylum in countries where they have a community. Algerians tend to go to France, Burundians to Belgium, etc.
Many Syrians, Afghans, Yemenis and Turks choose the Netherlands.
And in the Netherlands, asylum acceptance is based largely on a refugee’s country of origin. In 2022, the asylum application acceptance rates from these countries were close to 100%:
- 93% from Afghanistan
- 92% from Turkey
- 90% from Yemen
- 87% from Syria
The small percentage of rejections here likely represent applicants individuals failing to meet Dutch “integration criterion.” In 2018, one-fifth of Syrian asylum seekers were rejected because they demonstrated “extremist sympathies or because their ideas were not in line with Dutch values, such as equality between men and women.”
Refugees from “safe countries,” where there is generally no persecution, torture, or inhumane treatment, are almost never approved.
FYI: Ukrainians are not required to apply for asylum to stay in the Netherlands.
Messy statistics
The asylum application procedure varies enormously between EU countries. In the Netherlands, it’s super slow. Applicants are entitled to a lawyer, an interview with the IND with a translator, etc.
Therefore, there’s high percentage of acceptance on the first try.
See how France, which looks like it had a pretty low approval rate in 2021, got much higher after taking accepted appeals into account.
A wake-up call
Last summer, Rhodia Maas, the director of the IND, announced that the agency would give asylum applicants the “benefit of the doubt” more often to help process the backlog of applications faster.
This was a very remarkable thing for Dutch civil servant to say.
A little background:
Dutch bureaucracy under Mark Rutte’s 13 years as prime minister has been oriented towards the “self-reliance” of citizens and austerity.
This political philosophy worked its way into the civil service and led to a culture of administrators treating anyone who did seek out social services like a potential fraud — lest a few people actually break the rules.
The specter of fraud being the eternal conservative argument against providing social services — and making life difficult for everyone who does access government support — everywhere in the world.
In the Netherlands, this led to the disastrous “benefits affair,” the most devastating Dutch government scandal in recent memory.
Between 2005 and 2019, authorities wrongly accused an estimated 26,000 parents of making fraudulent benefit claims, requiring them to pay back the allowances they had received in their entirety. In many cases, this sum amounted to tens of thousands of euros, driving families into severe financial hardship.
This rigid application of rules led to suicides, suicide attempts, divorces, poverty, and tremendous psychological damage for victims. And what’s worse: very few victims have so far been compensated out of the 5.5 billion euro fund set up for this purpose… because the government can’t figure out how to administrate the payouts. Twisted.
Maas (the IND director) told Trouw that the benefits affair was a “wake-up call.”
In this context, the IND giving people the “benefit of the doubt” isn’t only about reducing the application backlog.
It’s about an organization not wanting to destroy lives because of an inhuman and inflexible application of the rules. Or, because applying rules in a certain way — specifically sending a person home to a war zone — would be politically advantageous to the cabinet. Maas:
I think — and this is not only visible at the IND — that many implementing organizations have said for too long: ‘If the politicians want this, then we will do it.’ At a certain point you come to the conclusion that you cannot fix everything.
A curious twist on political pressure
In the Volkskrant last week, Martin Sommer had quite an interesting angle on this:
The bottom line is that the IND civil servants are giving up. They prefer to approve an application and be done with it, under the pressure of child pardons, indignant talk show tables, excitement in the Chamber and judicial admonition. A no is no longer accepted…
Since the benefits affair, the embarrassed government has wanted to accommodate victims without asking many questions… Administrative apologies add up to official apologies, and even the government finds its actions of poor quality. That is not exactly an inviting atmosphere to question [a refugee’s] escape story.
This take fascinated me. I found it so counterintuitive!
I would have imagined that political pressure at the IND would be to reject asylum-seekers en masse. The shelters are a disaster, the backlog is enormous, the politicians are obviously at a loss, media coverage is apocalyptic…
But perhaps in the context of the Dutch administrative mindset today, none of the “politics” as far as we can see it on the outside matters.
Perhaps what matters to the IND civil servant is, increasingly, the human being sitting across the table at their asylum interview. Maas again:
We have agreed on rules about who can and cannot live in the Netherlands. As IND, we adhere to those rules, which are democratically legitimized. We really do nothing different than any other implementing organization.
But within those rules you always have to make an individual assessment, especially in asylum cases. The interests are great, employees are well aware of that. It’s annoying enough if you don’t get a student grant because something goes wrong at the Education Executive Agency, but it’s not a matter of life and death.
Ultimately, it’s about doing your job carefully. That you do justice to people in their application. You have to treat people nicely. Even if someone gets the incredibly nasty message that he is not allowed to stay in the Netherlands.
In the Volkskrant Sommer calls this “giving up.” He sees the IND turning a blind eye. But maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it. Maybe their eyes are more open than before.
And I don’t know what’s going on in the minds of administrators in Germany, France, and Denmark. But it’s not hard to imagine them operating in completely different political environments, and making different decisions as a result.
The bottom line
The Netherlands had the highest rate of asylum acceptance in Europe last year in part because sorting out statistics between European countries is complicated; a bigger number of “extremely well-founded” applications came in than before; and perhaps because the civil servants at the IND are trying to do a good, humane, job.
Ultimately the Netherlands is bound by international agreements, including the Geneva Convention on Refugees and the European Convention on Human Rights, which were established in response to the human rights atrocities of WWII.
Under these laws, the vast majority of refugees from countries like Afghanistan, Turkey, Yemen, Syria who apply for asylum in the Netherlands simply have the right to stay.
The influx will likely only increase in the coming years. On average, 21.5 million people are displaced annually due to climate change. Some estimates suggest 1.2 billion people could be displaced by 2050. Half of the world’s democracies are in a “state of decline.” Authoritarian regimes are becoming more repressive.
All of the policy tweaks floating around in the Dutch political atmosphere (new classifications for groups of migrants, ending appeals, reducing resident permit duration, deporting people back home when the situation in their home country improves, ending family reunification, quotas) might, to the extent that any of these initiatives have the slightest chance of passing into law or would even be legal in the long run, might slightly reduce the number of applicants here and there. Sure.
But that’s all just politics.
The best way to handle the influx is maybe the most politically unpopular position: accept it.
The Netherlands can do this by allowing all asylum-seekers to work immediately after arriving, the way Ukrainians can. This way they can contribute to the cost of their stay, begin to integrate into Dutch society, and take any jobs going unfilled due to a huge labor shortage — especially those usually filled by migrant workers, for whom there is already a housing crisis.
Accept it, work with it, and benefit from it.
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