Netherlands population rises to 17.2 million on immigration, Dutch re-patriation

The population of the Netherlands hit 17.2 million officially registered residents at the turn of the new year, an increase of 100 thousand from a year earlier. That gain is similar to figures released at the beginning of 2017, government office Statistics Netherlands (CBS) said on Tuesday.

About 82 thousand more people settled or re-settled in the Netherlands last year than the 139 thousand people who left the country. Roughly ten percent of the 220 thousand people who immigrated to the Netherlands in 2017 had a Dutch passport at the time of registration, according to a data table provided by the CBS.

All told, new residents of the Netherlands arrived with at least 190 different nationalities, though the CBS lumped all 8 thousand people from former Soviet Union countries into one statistic. This includes people from Russia, as well as Estonia and Latvia, for example. Of the remaining 198 thousand immigrants, around 22 thousand arrived from Poland like last year, 16 thousand came from Syria marking a 37 percent drop, and another 10 thousand had German nationality, a gain of eight percent.

There were also somewhat significant increases in new registered residents with Bulgarian and Romanian nationalities, while there was a drop in arrivals from Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq.

The remaining population growth came from natural population increase calculated by the number of births against the number of deaths.

The 19 thousand person increase points to a substantially lower birth rate than the previous year, when the natural increase was 24 thousand. The first quarter of 2017 even showed two thousand more deaths than births, the CBS report stated.

Those figures also correspond to the age that women have their first child on average. This has risen to 29.8 years of cage compared to 29.4 a year earlier,