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.
Honestly, the issue is deeper than that. Your government has been fighting a war on science and reason almost as long as ours has. Politicians and CEOs in your country have been hungrily watching what politicians allow them to get away with in our country for over half a century. It’s why they keep pushing for privatized healthcare for you and countries like the UK. The one that I’ll never forget was around 2010 when a conservative administration came into power and immediately shut down a multi-year study on UBI halfway through and then sealed the reports because it showed that all the things that they lie about are false. The only 2 groups to drop out of the workforce were pregnant women and students, graduation rates increased, as did college admission applications, and the economy in the area where the study took place saw a general boom as people were willing to spend more money. And all of that was on maybe a $1,500 a month UBI if I remember right.