Not Making it in the Netherlands: Excluding Irregular Immigrants to the Max

Guest post by Joanne van der Leun, Professor of Criminology at Leiden Law School, the Netherlands. She specializes in crime and migration, including irregular migration and human trafficking. This post is the second installment of the Border Criminologies Themed Week on Internal Border Policing organised by Leanne Weber.

Following the death of hundreds of refugees in one of the many recent dramas in the Mediterranean Sea, immigration is again high on the European agenda. This fuels debates on European border patrols and asylum policies, and influences political decision making on boundaries of belonging within nation states. The Netherlands has a long tradition of excluding people without residence rights from all sorts of services. For instance, one thorny issue is that some people without rights, who’ve ended up in marginal positions, are still offered shelter. From a humanitarian point of view this is essential, but it also undermines the official migration policy message.

For the past several weeks, the national coalition government in the Netherlands nearly collapsed over the issue of the treatment of asylum seekers. The locally organized food and shelter services for rejected asylum-seekers and other irregular migrants are under attack. After a long and heated political debate following a Council of Europe decision, Liberal and Labour leaders unveiled a compromise on 22 April 2015. Yet, in presenting their plans, the leaders interpreted the issue in completely different ways, which were also met with strong criticism in Dutch society. No one seems to believe that the plan to reduce the number of shelters and to make shelter conditional on the willingness to return is workable. Rather, it appears that the plan is meant to hammer home the message that there’s no place in Dutch society for people with no residence rights. Additionally, over the past few days, the example of Australia has been referenced. One of the Netherlands most active anti-immigration politicians, Geert Wilders, explicitly copied the ‘No way you will make Australia home’ campaign and translated it to the Dutch situation.

The example of what the Dutch have dubbed the ‘bed, bath and bread debate’ is illustrative of the difficulties of making migration policies in a time in which anti-immigrant sentiment among the public seems to be ever-growing. Many commentators have pointed to the fact that it was shameful to see the political turmoil about such a tiny issue in a rich country against the backdrop of the sheer size of the Mediterranean crisis. In the Netherlands, the debate is about an estimated 200 beds in a population of 16 million official inhabitants and an estimated 100,000 irregular migrants. A recent story in The Economist, when pointing out this contrast, offered scant comfort by maintaining that ‘

The real issue is located at a third level of policy-making: the EU. A sound and coherent European approach to refugee and irregular migrant issues is lacking. Meanwhile, money-making criminal organizations and individuals profit and fuel the criminal representations on which migration control thrives. To break this vicious cycle, scholars increasingly argue either for a world without borders (which is very unrealistic) or for a watertight system of migration management and control (which is equally unrealistic). Joining forces in the European Union to deal with the refugee crisis seems the only option that brings realistic ways to deal with migration.

But what happens in the meantime? While national governments in countries such as the Netherlands struggle in the political arena, civil society is filling the gaps. A recent inventory of shelters for irregular migrants revealed that most shelters in the Netherlands are run by pro-migration NGOs from different walks of life, often partially funded by local level governments. The good news is that there’s still some tolerance left. The bad news is that it’s not enough to solve the problem.

For more on this topic, see the forthcoming article: Van der Leun, J.P. & H. Bouter (2015) ‘Gimme Shelter: Inclusion and Exclusion of Irregular Immigrants in Dutch Civil Society’ in the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies.

Themed Week on Internal Border Policing:

• Monday, 18 May: Border as Method: Tracing the Internal Border (L. Weber)
• Tuesday, 19 May: Not Making it in the Netherlands: Excluding Irregular Immigrants to the Max (J. van der Leun)
• Wednesday, 20 May: The Boundaries of Belonging and the Immigration Policy Patchwork (M. Provine)
• Thursday, 21 May: Denying Migrants the ‘Right to Rent’: Enlisting Landlords in Immigration Surveillance (B. Bowling)
• Friday, 22 May: The Use of Informants in Immigration Policing (S. Mohn)

Any thoughts about this post? Get in touch with us! Send us an email, or post a comment here or on Facebook. You can also tweet us.

__________

How to cite this blog post (Harvard style):

van der Leun, J. (2015) Not Making it in the Netherlands: Excluding Irregular Immigrants to the Max. Available at: http://bordercriminologies.law.ox.ac.uk/irregular-immigrants-netherlands/ (Accessed [date]).