Fewer immigrants coming to Netherlands; Sharp drop in expats
With 316,000 immigrants, the number of people who came to the Netherlands fell by 19,000 last year, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) reported. According to the statistics agency, this is mainly due to fewer knowledge migrants choosing our country, namely 16,000, a decrease of 26 percent. People with specialist knowledge from India, in particular, stayed away. The number of expats from Russia, Turkey, South Africa, and China also fell.
The number of immigrants fell for the second year in a row after increasing from 2006 to 2022, when many Ukrainian refugees came to the Netherlands. This prompted the CBS to investigate the reasons why people went to the Netherlands.
Of the 335,000 immigrants in 2023, 21 percent came for work, 22 percent for family, 12 percent for study, and 10 percent for asylum. The 73,000 people who cited their family as their main motivation for moving to the Netherlands include more than 29,000 who joined a relative that immigrated for work, or roughly 40 percent.
About 5,000 followed someone who obtained refugee status, equaling about 7 percent, and fewer than 4,000 arrived to join a family member studying in the Netherlands. This makes up about 5 percent of those who relocated for family purposes.
According to CBS expert Tanja Traag, traveling to the Netherlands for family reasons can be defined in several ways. About half of the 73,000 immigrants joining a family member are “people who came here for love, for example, because they met a Dutch person abroad,” she said.
Traag based the distribution on figures from 2023 that were just released, because it is the most recent set of data with more complete figures. While people from outside the European Union have to state their reasons for coming to the Netherlands when applying for their visa, others are not immediately required to do so.
People from the EU and the four EFTA countries of Liechtenstein, Norway, Iceland, and Switzerland have a full year before they have to report their reasons for immigrating.
