Ter Apel, a small, unassuming Dutch town near the German border, is a place tourists rarely have on their itinerary. There are no lovely old windmills, no cannabis-filled coffee shops and on a recent visit it was far too early for tulip season.
When foreigners end up there, it is for one reason: to claim asylum at the Netherlands’ biggest refugee camp, home to 2,000 desperate people from all around the world.
Many of the American refugees, like Jane-Michelle Arc, a 47-year-old software engineer from San Francisco, are transgender. In April last year she flew into Schiphol airport in Amsterdam and, sobbing, asked a customs officer how to claim asylum. “And they laughed because: what’s this big dumb American doing here asking about asylum? And then they realised I was serious.”
Arc said the US had become such a hostile environment for trans people that she had stopped leaving the house “unless there was an Uber waiting outside”. She said she had been abused on the street and using the ladies’ toilets, and resolved to leave the country after a frightening incident when she feared a woman was going to run her over with her truck.
The system is only strained because liberals and fascists make it strained. People in Ter Apel are not allowed to work, they aren’t even allowed to hang out with citizens to integrate or to do informal work.
The housing shortage is the result of half a century of liberal dismantling of the robust social housing system, resulting in a deficit of which migrants are less than 5% of people that want a home.
If we built housing like China does and just let people work under the same collective labor contracts as citizens, there wouldn’t just be no problem; we would flourish.
Moreover, with climate change the amount of migration will only increase. The only options we have are (1) growing the migration system or (2) a war of annihilation in which the nations that set quotas try to murder enough migrants that the survivors fit under their quotas.
I would prefer option (1), so any migrant we get now who liberals and fascists struggle to classify as subhumans worthy of death is a win.