Dutch minister says Ukrainian refugees will go back to their country when it is safe

Minister of Migration Marjolein Faber has said that refugees from Ukraine will return to their country from the Netherlands when it is safe. She compared the situation to the Dutch people after World War II.

"The whole of the Netherlands was flattened in 1945," said Faber. "I did not see a single Dutch person leave then. What did the Dutch people do? They rolled up their sleeves." Faber added that the generations before her "worked extremely hard to rebuild the Netherlands."

Ukrainians can do the same, said the minister. "Because I think that Ukraine has a lot to offer as a country. There is oil; there is gas; they have fertile soil; there are minerals in the soil. It can become a wealthy country."

Trouw reported on Friday that many Ukrainian refugees do not yet know whether they want to return. An estimate from German researchers reportedly showed that 1.4 to 2.3 million of them want to remain abroad permanently. Young Ukrainians especially feel that the economic situation in their country plays a major part in whether they want to go back to their home country.

The development of the war will ultimately determine whether Ukrainians are allowed to remain in the Netherlands, and for how long, Faber continued. “Let’s just wait and see. But the core of it will be that they will go back at the moment the country is safe,” she stated.

“The situation is really different now than in 1945,” said historian Joost Rosendaal about Faber’s comparison with the World War II. The historian is a lecturer at Radboud University and researches World War II from various international perspectives, revolutionary movements, and political-cultural processes.

“In Belgium and Germany, the economy also had to be rebuilt, so it was not necessarily more advantageous to stay there,” he said on Friday. While the majority of the refugees returned to the Netherlands, some remained abroad. “For example, people who had emigrated to Belgium and had found a loved one there.”

In addition, the government actively campaigned shortly after the war to have Dutch people emigrate, said Rosendaal. “There were problems such as a housing shortage that we could not handle. So in the late 1940s and early 1950s, farmers in particular were encouraged to go to Canada, New Zealand or Australia, for example.”