Cabinet wants migration measured to help limit population to 20 million people by 2050

The Cabinet is going to make policies with an aim towards “moderate population growth” of around 19 to 20 million people in 2050. Minister Marjolein Faber (Migration) and Eddy van Hijum (Social Affairs) wrote this in a letter to parliament. The Lower House of the Dutch Parliament, the Tweede Kamer, is going to look into the report made by the Van Zwol Commission, which advised about population growth.

The Cabinet agrees with the commission that the scenario in which the population grows by 1 to 2 million people by 2050 is the best option "for the preservation of economic and broad prosperity.”

They also recognize that moderate growth will put pressure on housing, healthcare, and education. This would mean that 1.3 million new homes would have to be built before 2040. "Almost half of this challenge comes from accommodating expected population growth."

That means that they cannot wait to make strong choices regarding slowing down the population growth, they added. They are mainly referring to the proposed measures to ensure that fewer migrants can come to the Netherlands.

Van Hijum said on Tuesday that The EU (European Union) member states are divided about the necessity of using labor migrants to fix staff shortages. The EU ministers for Employment agree that training people should be the basis for future labor policies in the EU and the member states,

“You can see that the countries are very different in the way that they handle labor migration,” Van Hijum said after a meeting with his EU colleagues in Brussels. “In the Netherlands, we have emphatically said that labor migration is not the structural and sustainable answer to a staff shortage. Other countries do see labor migration as the solution.”

He mentioned Spain as one of the countries that is receiving labor migrants with open arms. “That is a reality that we, of course, have to deal with."

According to Van Hijum, these differences in approach do not so much undermine cooperation in the EU, "but it does require some degree of cooperation in this area".

He wants to prevent migrant workers from outside the EU from being posted via other EU countries without having worked there. "And then also ending up in the Netherlands."

The Cabinet’s expectation that fewer migrants will be coming to the Netherlands is not based on the effectiveness of the measures, but rather that the hard tone set by the government will act as a deterrent, Faber said.

She mentioned Sweden as an example of a country that made their country less attractive for migrants in this way over the last few years.

The Tweede Kamer had asked Faber to explain why she thinks that the assessment and reception of asylum seekers can be done with a reduced by billions of euros in the budget for the coming years. She believes that only a third of the number of asylum seekers of 2026 will be coming to the Netherlands in 2027.

Faber was put under pressure by the leader of the PVV, which is the largest party in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders on Tuesday. He is pushing for the Cabinet and Faber to speed up their implementation of the asylum legislation. “There are a lot of plans and not many laws yet.”

After the summer break, the Hague political scene spent months discussing an emergency asylum law. This was a fervent wish of the PVV, but another coalition party, the NSC, had difficulty with using the emergency law for this.

At the end of October, the coalition parties reached a compromise after lengthy deliberations: the emergency law was off the table, and in return, some asylum rules were tightened. For example, the plan is to no longer issue asylum permits for an indefinite period and to shorten the duration of temporary permits from five to three years.

These rules will be included in the so-called "emergency asylum measures law" that Faber wants to send to the Council of State this year for them to look over urgently. She still has more than two weeks to do this. She has to submit her plan to the Council of Ministers before Wednesday, 18 December, as that is the last day before the Christmas break period.