Due the increasing amount of boat refugees coming to the European Union as of late, the the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) proposed on 22 March this year that we completely close the outer borders of the EU for asylum seekers. According to them asylum seekers are costly for us, they facilitate human trafficking and it’s hard to separate legit refugees from economic migrants and terrorists. The massive influx of refugees would cause societal breakdown in the EU. Refugees should be housed in their own region and be able to build a new life there, possibly with aid from the EU.
While I am sympathetic to some of the reasoning of the proposal, it lacks solidarity and is short-sighted. In some cases regional capacity for hosting refugees is already stressed to the limit. Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan hosted respectively 1,59 million, 1,15 million and 654.100 refugees according to the UNHCR Global Trends report on forced displacement in 2014. Lebanon is even the country with the largest amount of refugees compared to its own population in the world, with 232 refugees per 1.000 inhabitants. That’s insane and makes it obvious to me that our sense of solidarity obliges us to help out with hosting Syrian refugees. During the debate in the House of Representatives about the plan, it was claimed that even 95% of refugees are already hosted in their own region. Also, legal experts were quick to point out that the VVD’s plan would violate international treaties, making it difficult to implement. It was clear that except for the right-wing Party for Freedom (PVV), there was no support for the plan.
My own party GroenLinks, the Dutch Green Party, responded with an alternative proposal. It boils down to five points: preventing that more refugees drown, allowing refugees to apply for asylum while outside the EU, improve facilities to house refugees in their own region, better distribution of refugees within the EU and structural solutions for the refugee problem.
The alternative plan of my own political party sounds good, but it refuses to acknowledge the existence of economic migration. And while they might not form a significant part of the refugees, economic migrants do exist. On several news reports I’ve seen refugees from Pakistan. Yes, there’s a war in North-West Pakistan, but millions of Pakistanis are apparently able to lead relatively peaceful lives in other regions of their country. I think Pakistan should be able to help it’s own internal refugees, possibly with international aid.
Also consider that the public housing sector in the Netherlands can’t cope with the demand exerted by all the refugees which are entitled to housing. They practically receive housing for free because they are likely to live on welfare. They are given precedence over the Dutch citizens who are on the waiting list for public housing. The obvious reason refugees seek asylum in Western Europe is that they are entitled to much more aid than in neighboring states in their region. While I agree that we should spend more on foreign aid for refugees, I think we should make our public services for asylum seekers more sober simultaneously. I don’t feel the plan of GroenLinks addresses these issues sufficiently.
I totally agree that we should be generous to refugees from Syria. But they can be given temporary asylum in order to force their return when the Syrian Civil War is over. They can be housed in more sober asylum centers or intermodal container housing instead of public housing.