Netherlands Starts to Close the Door as a Haven for Refugees : Aliens: Lacking adequate money, housing and jobs, Dutch tighten rules for those seeking asylum in high-tech welfare state.

The Netherlands is tightening the rules on asylum because it does not have enough money, housing and jobs for all the poor refugees flooding in.

Holland is a historic haven for the oppressed. It sheltered the Pilgrims, who fled religious persecution in England, before they sailed for the New World.

In 1980, only 1,330 people claimed refugee status in the Netherlands. This year, the number is expected to reach 20,000 and the government threatens to jail aliens who make unjustified requests for asylum.

Dutch officials contend that most asylum seekers are economic refugees looking for easier lives in this high-tech welfare state.

Hundreds of people have come from economically depressed Eastern Europe in recent months, and the government fears a new rush of arrivals if the Persian Gulf crisis turns into war.

The Netherlands subscribes to the United Nations definition of political refugees as those fleeing persecution on ideological grounds, and is reluctant to stretch its welfare resources in a time of economic uncertainty.

Jobs, housing and tolerance are getting scarce, and only about 13% of asylum requests are approved.

“This is one of the most densely populated countries in the world,” said Maurice van Hezik, spokesman for the Justice Ministry. “There’s pretty high unemployment among the non-Dutch population. If you were to admit people who only come to work, that would make the problem worse.”

One asylum seeker, Sara Amini of Iran, claims that she was persecuted at home for being a member of a small opposition party in Iran.

When she arrived last summer with her husband and two children, she expected the free housing and allowances that used to be given nearly all asylum seekers.

Instead, they were jammed into a 15-foot-square room at a former convent school in Rijsbergen, one of 23 refugee camps in Holland.

“I heard people in the Netherlands were very friendly, very helpful compared to other European people,” Amini said in an interview. “I didn’t expect it to be like this.”

People seeking asylum in the Netherlands used to be taken to government-subsidized housing projects and given social welfare payments equivalent to about $800 a month.

In 1987, however, an influx of ethnic Tamils fleeing the civil war in Sri Lanka gave rise to what critics call the “bed, bath and bread” program.

The government opened 15 refugee camps, including Rijsbergen, to house asylum seekers during processing.

Aad Kosto, deputy justice minister, said this summer he would jail those who sought asylum without good reason and might flee the camps and try to lose themselves in the population.

Only a few people have been jailed, but the practice is expected to become more common in the effort to stop rejected asylum seekers from joining the estimated 50,000 to 60,000 illegal aliens in this nation of 14.6 million.

Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers summoned the mayors of eight towns and villages in September and told them each would be host to a new refugee camp. He said the first busloads of people were on their way.

Seven more camps are planned by the Welfare Ministry, which is buying 500 mobile homes.

Van Hezik said some people admit they’ve only come for jobs, and others offer “the strangest stories.”

He cited the case of a Third World refugee who claimed to have arrived on a ship bound for Switzerland, which is landlocked. Van Hezik said the man apparently hoped to be expelled to that country.

In early August, Romanians began pouring into Eindhoven in southern Holland. Radio Free Europe, the U.S.-sponsored station, had described the city as hospitable to strangers, Van Hezik said.

Hundreds of East Europeans have made their way to the Netherlands and the Persian Gulf may provide the next source of refugees, said Jan Tielemans, director of the Rijsbergen camp.

“We’ll probably be noticing the side effects . . . the Indians, the Sri Lankans who are huddling in Jordan, Egyptians too,” he said. “We won’t know for another few months.

“Some of these people are simply looking for a living, and they think one of the ways they’ll get it is by asking for asylum.”

A 26-year-old Iraqi at Rijsbergen said he deserted Saddam Hussein’s army days before it invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2.

“I was sick and tired of it all,” said the man, who identified himself as an artillery sergeant born in Yemen. He would not give his name. “I just wondered what would happen if I deserted.”

He said he hid in a helicopter belonging to the Red Crescent, the Muslim version of the Red Cross, which took him from his position near Basra in the south to the Kurdistan region of northwestern Iraq, then crossed into Turkey.

The Iraqi said he reached Amsterdam by ship, and acknowledged he stood “very little chance” of being accepted as a refugee.