Professor Arjen Leerks from Erasmus University Rotterdam appears on a Dutch radio (podcast) to provide an explanation of the Dutch ‘spreidingswet’.
This podcast was originally posted on Dutch national radio.
The outgoing Dutch State Secretary Eric van der Burg is once again defending “his” distribution law today. This much-discussed law is currently being debated in the Senate, which will vote on it next Tuesday. The division could not be more significant: Van der Burg’s own VVD party is against it, as are the PVV, BBB, and NSC—all of whom are in discussions about forming a new government. And in the Senate, the outcome could still go either way, as the division is 50/50. But putting all opinions aside, what exactly does this law entail? In this podcast, we are going to read through the distribution law together with Arjen Leerkes, a migration expert at Erasmus University Rotterdam. We will follow the document’s path: what is written in it, what has been adjusted along the way, and what does the text concretely mean? These might seem like basic questions, but in times of such intense debate, it can be quite enlightening to take a moment to consider them more thoroughly.