How do Musselkanalers feel about an asylum centre? “Everyone who lives here is a Musselkanaler”
For a week, social geography and planning students investigated support for the asylum seekers’ center (azc) in the Groningen village of Musselkanaal. They advised the village to promote as much contact as possible between asylum seekers and the Musselkanalers. After all, “God made everyone equal,” residents argue.
About 90 students of Social Geography & Planning conducted a fieldwork study during the second week of January in the village of Musselkanaal in the Groningen municipality of Stadskanaal on support for the asylum seekers’ center there. Last Friday, in a live connection from REC-A, they presented their research results to stakeholders of the Stadskanaal municipality, including the mayor and the asylum center manager. Their main joint conclusion: The more contact with asylum seekers residents have, the more positive they are.
Dispersion law
Divided into 15 groups, the third-year students conducted over 500 surveys of 67 Musselkanalers. In 2020, the Musselkanaal asylum center opened its doors to more than 400 asylum seekers. The intention of the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA) is for the center to remain open until at least 2025. However, with the announced dispersion law, not included in the students’ surveys, an as yet undetermined number of asylum seekers might eventually be housed in other municipalities that currently do not receive enough asylum seekers.
“No second Ter Apel with tents”
Musselkanaal is a stone’s throw from Ter Apel, where there is an asylum seekers’ center for another 2,000 asylum seekers. The latter center has been in the news recently both because of insufficient facilities for too many residents and violent incidents in the center. The residents of Musselkanaal therefore indicated above all that they did not want to become “a second Ter Apel with tents.”
Both the qualitative and quantitative surveys also showed that residents of Musselkanaal who had heard stories about Ter Apel second or third-hand thought significantly more negatively towards an asylum seekers’ center. Negative posts in certain Facebook groups from other Musselkanaal residents who are skeptical of certain media and tell mostly negative stories about asylum seekers in the area contributed to the development of a negative opinion towards the asylum seekers’ center.
Neighborhood Day
This opinion seemed to grow stronger when respondents lived farther away from the asylum seekers’ center and thus only had “superficial” contact with its residents, such as at the supermarket. But playing soccer together with the asylum seekers, doing volunteer work in the neighborhood, or having a neighborhood day with refugees made the villagers think more positively about the presence of an asylum seekers’ center.
The role of the church also proved important in the villagers’ perceptions, as they regularly mingled there with asylum seekers: Faith appeared to connect. Religious Musselkanalers also stated, “God created everyone equal.” Most Musselkanalers thus seemed proud of their church but were equally proud of their congregation. That admiration stemmed in part from the rapid acceptance of Ukrainian refugees. “The Netherlands sends its overflow to Groningen, but the congregation has handled it well.”
The municipality was not entirely pleased with the results, because the support base was smaller than individuals involved in the center and the municipality had expected. The municipality was shocked by some racist responses from villagers, such as one respondent who said “I still get scared when I see a black person on the street at night” and from a resident who called Islam “a source of evil.”
Soccer tournament
The municipality had also hoped that the students would do more research on proposals for contact between Musselkanalers and asylum seekers. When one of the students himself came up with “maybe a soccer tournament,” a person involved in the municipality said that she “could have thought of that herself.” The municipality was also skeptical about the conclusion that highly educated people thought more positively about the asylum seekers’ center: “Should we only set up asylum seekers’ centers in neighborhoods in the Netherlands that have highly educated people?”
An important factor in the more negative opinions mentioned, according to the students, was that almost all Musselkanalers made a distinction between “fortune seekers” (those who come from a safe country) and real refugees (war refugees). The latter group was overwhelmingly welcomed. Because, as one resident of the village stated, “Everyone who lives in Musselkanaal is a Musselkanaler.”
