ABSTRACT
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a few hundred Portuguese war resisters and an American deserter sought refuge in the Netherlands. These ‘New Refugees’ (Cohen & Joly 1989: 6) were the first substantial group of asylum seekers to flee from non-communist countries to the Netherlands since the beginning of the post-Second World War era. Their arrival was part of a broader phenomenon: after the late 1960s the number of asylum applicants increased, and their countries of origin and their reasons for fleeing diversified (Paludan 1981: 69; Hoeksma 1987: 98; Gallagher 1989; Bronkhorst 1990: 44). This chapter describes the responses of Dutch authorities and powerful lobby groups to their arrival. Large numbers of people applied for asylum, but their social backgrounds, countries of origin, as well as their motives, had shifted. This, in turn, might have led to a moral panic in Dutch society and subsequent changes in refugee policy. In reality it did not.
