According to ‘sources around the formation’, the possibility of labeling the asylum situation as a ‘crisis’ is being considered. This would make exceptional measures possible, such as temporarily no longer processing asylum applications at all. According to the PVV and the VVD, the numbers of asylum seekers are now so large that the Netherlands can no longer cope.
It is an argument that other European countries, such as Hungary and Lithuania, have also tried. Hungary did so at the height of the European refugee crisis in 2015 and Lithuania tried in 2021 after Belarus sent hundreds of migrants to that country’s external borders.
The European Court of Justice made short work of it, because the right to asylum is a fundamental right. Not much more sensible can be said about the proposals from a legal perspective. It’s not allowed, period.
But what does the desire to declare a state of exception actually say about the parties sitting at the formation table?
Permanent state of crisis
In recent years, migration policy has been continuously portrayed as crisis management by the PVV and the VVD. These parties find it easier to turn the internal crises facing the country, for example in the areas of housing and poverty reduction, inside out than to tackle them from within.
Asylum policy has become a mechanism that regulates and creates a permanent state of crisis. Crisis in the hands of the PVV and the VVD serves nothing more or less than a political agenda, as was evident from the fall of the cabinet following the subsequent travelers.
Also read
Asylum measure that led to the fall of the government had made a difference of 1 to 2 percent of total immigration
It now appears again at the formation table: crisis is a way to achieve the asylum stop that Wilders so fervently desired. But asylum seekers, immigrants, people crossing international borders do not pose an exceptional threat to a healthy democracy.
The notion of crisis that is now being discussed on the formation table completely misses the point. If the parties talking to each other there had really understood what a crisis is, they would have turned their attention inward. In that case they would have seen that the real solutions do not lie in an asylum stop. These solutions can be found in better socio-economic policies in the areas of housing, labor and poverty. Furthermore, they are served by a long-term vision on migration, which in a globalized world can only be developed in an international context.
The notion of crisis that is now on the formation table completely misses the point
But much more importantly, by turning the focus inward, on themselves, politicians could see the so-called asylum crisis for what it really is: a moral crisis that links political violence to indifference. European migration policies have led to almost 29,000 people dying in the Mediterranean since 2015. Emergency measures at Europe’s eastern borders have resulted in people being sent back to the inhospitable forests of Belarus, where they are left to die in the cold or from lack of water.
Asylum policy is now a mechanism that regulates and causes a permanent crisis
People who wanted to help them are being prosecuted. Indifference is reflected in the 1,015 unmarked graves in 65 cemeteries, where people who tried to reach the EU are buried without being identified along Europe’s external border in Poland, Lithuania, Greece, Spain, Italy, Malta, France and Croatia.
Dying on migration routes
The parties at the formation table are not discussing proposals that could help ensure that people who die on migration routes are found or identified, or that a procedure is devised for how to deal with their bodies. Let alone that they try to curb the violence associated with current forms of border control.
It is this crisis of indifference to political violence that concerns us all. Crisis management is a dead end: if it increases the capacity to govern, it fatally affects moral and political legitimacy.
Click the check mark next to ‘I’m not a robot’
To share
Email the editor
