“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.”
