Dutch government announces ‘strictest asylum policy ever’

The Netherlands’ government plans to bring in drastic new anti-immigration measures, set to be some of the strictest in the European Union.

Its plans, announced Friday as a part of the ruling coalition’s program, include stricter border checks, “tit for tat” punishments of “troublemakers,” restrictions on family reunification that would bar adult children from joining their parents, and a focus on forced returns.

The Dutch government is the first to feature the far-right, anti-immigration Freedom Party of Geert Wilders, who won nearly a quarter of the Dutch parliament’s seats in November. His party delivered the government’s migration and asylum minister, Marjolein Faber.

“I’m aiming for the strictest asylum policy ever,” Faber said in a video message, citing bottlenecks in housing, health care and education as reasons to do so.

The plan, she said, is to “legally declare an asylum crisis, which will allow me to take measures to combat [it].” Such an emergency law would allow the government to take measures without waiting for the parliament’s approval.

“The Netherlands should belong to the category of member states with the strictest admission rules in the EU,” the government program reads.

The government will ask the European Commission for an opt-out on EU asylum and migration policies — that request will be sent to Brussels next week, Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof said Friday.

“We cannot continue to bear the large influx of migrants to our country. People are experiencing an asylum crisis, ” Schoof said, defending the emergency measure and the planned asylum crisis law.

He rejected a question to put a number on the influx decrease it wants to achieve, instead saying that the government would assess the need for the crisis law by regularly “checking how the Netherlands is doing at that moment.”

Faber said she wants to halt indefinite permits; shorten proceedings; limit family reunification “substantially, for a very large proportion of applicants”; and speed up deportations of “criminal asylum seekers.”

The program also proposes a change to housing laws to prevent asylum seekers with a residence permit from getting priority access to social housing because of that statute in order to “relieve pressure on the housing market.”

Opposition members have already lashed out at Faber’s plan to trigger an emergency law to speed up her migration plans as “anti-democratic.” The Dutch Council for Refugees said Thursday that it was “deeply concerned” that “refugees would pay a high price” for the measures.

The force majeure clauses are there for wars or natural disasters, whereas the country’s asylum problems are the consequences of political choices, the organization argued. “There is no unexpectedly large number of asylum seekers in The Netherlands. No force majeure, but political unwillingness,” the refugee council said.