Introduction: Two types of heroes

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.

According to some scholars, the arrival of the New Refugees led to departures from earlier post-war refugee asylum policies (Van Esterik 1998: 120). These New Refugees were less successful than the anticommunists had been in Western asylum procedures (Bronkhorst 1990: 140; Van Esterik 1998: 120). Authorities viewed the New Refugees with suspicion, because they were not the ‘enemies of our enemies’, as the anticommunists had been (Zolberg 2006: 18). Portuguese war resisters were rarely granted refugee status, but they were seldom forced to leave the Netherlands. Fewer than 3% of the Portuguese refugees were denied residence permits from 1968 to 1973. This number contradicts the image of a restrictive policy. Dutch authorities chose a pragmatic solution: New Refugees were granted residence permits, but denied refugee status.

Before 1970, most asylum seekers were characterised as anticommunists. The 1950s refugee was depicted as a heroic male figure fighting against the terrors of communism (Carruthers 2005). A political activist, he was a member of his country's intelligentsia, and an asset to Western society. Defectors played a crucial role in anticommunist propaganda. Anticommunists did not arrive in large numbers, except following the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and the 1968 Prague Spring. But those who managed to cross the Iron Curtain are believed to have been warmly welcomed.