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.
Upvoted for the good faith argument and conversation.
I don’t entirely agree or disagree with you. I think they have basically no chance of getting asylum because the dutch government doesn’t see the US as an unsafe place and so in a way this is taking away time and resources from people who, like you said, are fleeing from things like civil wars.
Also as an american you can move to the Netherlands legally relatively easily! You need money, yes, but it’s waaaaaay easier for an american than for basically any other non European. You can start your own company here, invest not even that much and you get a residency permit. I know multiple Americans here who have done this, including a non binary person (irrelevant but for them it was a reason to leave the US).
At the same time I can’t blame anyone from wanting to escape a threatening and dangerous situation. Just getting on a flight is the quickest way to safety, so of course I empathise (and clearly so do you, just to make that clear).