Number of undocumented people in Netherlands vastly underestimated
According to official estimates by the Ministry of Justice and Security’s Scientific Research and Data Center (WODC), about 20,000 undocumented people are living in the Netherlands. According to research by the newspaper Trouw, that is a massive underestimation.
Undocumented persons are foreign nationals living in the Netherlands without a valid residency permit. Over the past few months, Trouw compared official estimates on this group with local counts, registrations from care organizations, and figures from municipalities. The newspaper found that the unofficial counts are much higher. It also found that hat certain groups are very underrepresented in the statistics. Children, women, and the elderly seem to disappear in the official figures.
According to the WODC report, there are only 312 undocumented children in the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, undocumented parents have been able to register their child with the Leergeld Foundation for educational support for several years now. In 2025, the Leergeld Foundation helped 935 undocumented children in Amsterdam alone. In The Hague, the Wereldhuis drop-in center for undocumented people counted 400 children last year. That means that the number of undocumented children in two cities is already four times higher than the official count.
Underestimating the number of undocumented children can be devastating, Ilse van Liempt, a professor of geography of migration at Utrecht University, told Trouw. “Children are very invisible, even though they actually have more rights than adults in the area of education and healthcare. But if they are not visible and their parents are afraid of the authorities, those rights are not realized.”
The WODC report estimates that there are around 200 undocumented people over 60 in the entire Netherlands. Also not true, Trouw found. The Rotterdam-based foundation ROS alone already has over 200 undocumented people over age 60 in its system. In Amsterdam, the Kruispost foundation, which provides medical assistance to the uninsured, treated 932 people over 60 in 2023. “Virtually all undocumented,” a spokesperson said.
And according to the WODC estimate, 87 percent of all undocumented people in the Netherlands are male. That would mean that there are only 2,600 undocumented women and girls in the Netherlands. According to Trouw, none of the organizations it spoke to recognized such a skewed male-female ratio.
While the vast majority of rejected asylum seekers are male, the majority of undocumented people never applied for asylum, several experts told the newspaper. And even organizations that primarily help asylum seekers who have exhausted all legal remedies don’t see mostly men come by. Organizations in Amsterdam and Eindhoven reported 64 percent men, and organizations in The Hague reported 54 percent men.
According to Van Liempt, women’s self-reliance may be behind this skewed figure. Her research focuses specifically on undocumented people who have a job, somewhere to live, and have never applied for asylum. According to her, this group includes many domestic workers of Filipino, Indonesian, or Latin American descent and rarely approaches aid organizations because they support one another.
Women’s underrepresentation in the official figures also has consequences, Van Liempt said. Women need specific policies regarding maternity care, abortion care, and sexual violence. A structural underrepresentation means there is no incentive to organize this.
