Dutch gov't taking steady action to discourage expats from coming to Netherlands
The Dutch government is steadily and relatively quietly taking action to reduce labor- and knowledge migration. Minister Eddy van Hijum of Social Affairs is sending letter after letter to parliament, but unlike Asylum Minister Marjolein Faber’s asylum policy, it's causing little to no stir. Companies and expats are noticing and are concerned Bas ter Weel, director of SEO Economic Research and professor of economics at the University of Amsterdam, told Trouw.
So far, Van Hijum has given the Labor Inspectorate greater mandate to tackle employers abusing expat and migrant worker regulations, he is investigating the meat sector where many migrant workers work, and he is working on a bill to ban rogue employment agencies from the market. NSC leader Pieter Omtzigt is also again pushing to cut the 30 percent ruling for expats.
This quiet, but aggressive approach is already having an effect, Ter Weel told the newspaper, referring to the falling number of international students. “The business community is shocked by the tone,” he said. The same holds true for expats. “I notice that people are worried, that they don’t really know where they stand.”
The government and coalition parties argue that migrants - asylum seekers, expats, migrant workers, and international students alike - put great pressure on social security. “I am not surprised that the housing market in Amsterdam or Eindhoven is completely destroyed,” NSC leader Pieter Omtzigt said in a parliamentary debate on knowledge migration last week. “If you give those people who come from outside a much higher net income from the same gross income, you are destroying your own labor market.”
Ter Weel questions Omtzigt’s argument. “The housing market problem has other causes, such as restrictive legislation and regulations. You can’t solve that by closing off the knowledge flows. That’s ineffective,” he told the newspaper. In March last year, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN special rapporteur on adequate housing, published a report stating explicitly that decades of government policy - not immigrants - are responsible for the housing shortage in the Netherlands.
Nevertheless, the government’s arguments are gaining increasing support in parliament, as the past few debates on labor and knowledge migration showed. Last week, a parliamentary majority rejected an amendment to the Aliens Act which would relax the rules for obtaining a European Blue Card in line with European regulations and, in practice, make it easier for expats to settle in the Netherlands.
