The Dutch Asylum Crisis Law Is Baseless and Dangerous

On September 13, Dutch prime minister Dick Schoof held a press conference to announce his new government’s coalition agreement. Essential to these plans — as the coalition’s four right-wing to far-right parties had already agreed in May — is the introduction of an unprecedented “asylum crisis law.” In an extraordinary expansion of the tools to restrain migrants, it will allow the government to take anti-immigration measures without the approval of the parliament or senate.

The declaration of an alleged “asylum crisis” is the culmination of a more than two-decade-long offensive by right-wing populist forces. In 2001, the media-savvy dandy Pim Fortuyn, the father of this part of the political spectrum, changed the rules of Dutch politics by making an obsession with “immigrants” socially acceptable. Four years later, Geert Wilders founded his anti-Islam electoral vehicle, the Party for Freedom (PVV). The neoliberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) under Mark Rutte, in power for the last fourteen years, maintained a symbolic distance from the PVV, allowing its purported liberal “reasonableness” to compare favorably with Wilders’s “extremism.” Yet the PVV and several big Dutch media channels have constantly put migration on the agenda. Hamas’s October 7 attacks were further used to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment.

This provided the background for the November 22, 2023, general election, which set the stage for the new government. The snap vote came after then prime minister Rutte opportunistically let his government fall by refusing to compromise on migration; Dilan Yesilgöz, his successor as VVD leader, then embraced a far-right course on the issue. Presented with the choice between original and copy, at election time voters chose the former. In the vote, the PVV secured almost a quarter of seats in parliament. Other big winners were the right-wing populist Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) and the…