Thread by @basilok

Because the coverage in the US press of the Dutch government’s fall yesterday is somewhat lacking (@nytimes kind of gets it; @washingtonpost does not get it at all), here’s a summary of what happened: 🧵1/13

Mark Rutte’s conservative-liberal VVD party (roughly translates in American terms to “country club Republicans”) has been in charge of immigration policy for over 10 years, and (with interruptions) for numerous years before that. Despite being more or less exactly aware of 2/13

how many people could be expected to apply for asylum in the Netherlands every year (yes, more than before the war started in Syria, but still a manageable number), the government intentionally closed down all asylee reception centers except one, far away from all population 3/13

centers, and reduced capacity there. This led to abominable conditions of people sleeping outside and even a baby dying. NGOs had to intervene to fill the gap in care, as if the Netherlands was some kind of failed state. What was the government’s response? 4/13

Deciding to restrict rights of family reunification for _refugees whose asylum claims had already been approved_. Everyone knew that this was completely illegal, yet the government persisted in this policy until it was struck down by the high administrative court, which 5/13

even, unusually, live-streamed the hearing during which the government lawyer had the chutzpah to argue that it would be cruel and unusual treatment of children, violating the European Convention of Human Rights, if they were allowed to come to a country that had no decent 6/13

housing for them, turning ECHR case law about why refugees couldn’t be sent back to e.g. Greece on its head. Meanwhile, probably the most genuinely liberal and humane politician from the VVD was given the thankless task, as the new deputy minister in charge of immigration, 7/13

of drafting a law that would force municipalities to accept government plans for building new reception centers distributed evenly all over the country. The local political bigwigs in the VVD revolted openly at a party conference, all but demanding Rutte’s head on a pike and 8/13

even suggesting mass deportation of refugees to camps in former Dutch colonies. So that’s what happened:a government that intentionally created the optics of refugees as presenting an existential threat to the orderly gated-community image that the Netherlands has of itself, 9/13

all so that the VVD could continue to insist that the only option for reducing this self-created chaos was more lawlessness, ie another attempt to restrict family reunification. Meanwhile, it ginned up annual immigration stats (roughly 250,000) by not accounting for 10/13

emigration and also creating the image that it was all refugees,when they were actually just a very small part of that number (and their subsequently joining family members even smaller). In fact, the lion’s share of immigration is EU citizens,whose migration can be no more 11/13

restricted than, say, migration of Oklahomans to California. Many of them take thankless jobs in horrible and optically ugly working conditions, ruthlessly exploited by Dutch employers, who in turn are enabled by the laissez-faire policies of— you got it: 12/13

The VVD. So this is the story of a political party, in charge for years, which itself created images of chaos and disorder in order to then invoke them as a specter that would justify pulling the plug on a government whose coalition partners did not agree with the VVD’s solution.