Dutch people's personal networks often not very diverse

People with a Dutch-only background rarely mix with people with foreign roots. They have relatively few neighbors, colleagues, family, housemates, or classmates with a different ethnicity in their network. According to Statistics Netherlands (CBS), the division is even stronger among richer people born in the Netherlands to Dutch parents.

The statistics office investigated this from 2009 to 2020, a period in which many ethnically diverse people came to live in the Netherlands. In everyday life, people of Dutch origin encounter more people of different ethnicities. Yet the separation between these groups has not decreased but has actually increased slightly. A diverse society does not necessarily ensure that people with different backgrounds mix more with each other, CBS concluded.

The more money Dutch people have, the more separated they live. CBS believes this is because relatively fewer people of foreign origin live and work in richer neighborhoods and at companies with many well-paid jobs. As a result, their network is less diverse. For people with Turkish and Moroccan roots, for example, this is the other way around: people with a higher income have a less separate network than people with a lower income.

According to the researchers, all population groups live separated from each other to a certain extent. After all, people who look alike seek each other out. However, as scientific research shows, too much separation can create strong “social bubbles” that can lead to more polarization. To discover how extensive this origin segregation is, the statistics office linked all kinds of data sets. That created a kind of network of all Dutch people, with which CBS calculated how many people from their own or different origin groups were included.