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“Last year, 400,000 people came to the Netherlands as immigrants. That is more people than live in Utrecht. That’s not possible. We need to get immigration under control.”
These were the words of former minister Henk Kamp (VVD), spoken just after the cabinet fall in July News hour. Kamp defended Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s choices. “The problem of uncontrolled immigration and the out-of-control asylum policy must be changed.”
Kamp did not mention that 400,000 immigrants have never come to the Netherlands in recent decades. The figure is an outlier, largely attributable to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. More than 108,000 Ukrainians applied for temporary protection in the Netherlands last year.
Last year, more people emigrated from the Netherlands than in the past twenty years: almost 180,000 Immigration minus emigration leads to the migration balance, the number of people who arrived in the Netherlands in a year. The time when this balance fluctuated around 0 is long behind us. Since 2012, the migration balance has increased almost continuously, apart from the corona period. Last year the net migration was approximately 224,000 people.
On average, the largest group of immigrants (53 percent) came from the European Union over the past ten years. To work here, to study for family formation. The second group (31 percent) consists of migrants from outside the EU. The third group (11 percent) consists of asylum migrants.
Which nationalities came to the Netherlands last year? The largest group of immigrants consisted of Ukrainians. In second place, with 11 percent, came immigrants from… the Netherlands. They returned after an earlier departure. The third group (7 percent) was Polish.
There are more perspectives from which to look at migration than just the basic figures on immigration and emigration. An important factor is population growth, and which migrant groups contribute most to this. The idea is that people who settle in the Netherlands will make use of scarce facilities such as housing or energy for a longer period of time.
There are four primary reasons for which immigrants travel to the Netherlands: work, family, study and asylum. A calculation by the Central Planning Bureau shows that family and asylum migrants contribute relatively most to the growth of the Dutch population.
That’s how it is. Of all labor migrants, almost 75 percent have left the Netherlands again after ten years. More than eight in ten students from abroad have left after ten years. But of all asylum migrants, almost three quarters are still in the Netherlands after ten years.
The conclusion that asylum migration accounted for ‘only’ 11 percent of total immigration over the past ten years is therefore only half the truth. Of the immigrants who are still in the Netherlands after ten years, at least a quarter arrived in the Netherlands as asylum seekers.
Additional travelers come on top of that. These are family members who are allowed to bring recognized refugees to the Netherlands. In national statistics they are not classified as ‘asylum migrants’ but as ‘family migrants’.
Reunion journeys by family members of asylum seekers have increased in recent years and this increase is expected to continue. This is partly due to the significant growth in the number of unaccompanied minor refugees seeking asylum in the Netherlands. This group, which has more than doubled in two years, requests travel in connection with family reunification relatively often.
Anyone who follows the debates on migration in the House of Representatives might get the feeling that the majority of people who flee to Europe travel directly to the registration center in Ter Apel to apply for asylum in the Netherlands.
But nothing is less true. The number of asylum applications here is particularly average. Last year, the Netherlands received two asylum applications per thousand inhabitants. The EU average was also exactly two asylum applications per thousand inhabitants, according to figures from the European Statistics Office. In the EU ranking, the Netherlands was in eleventh place, behind, for example, Belgium, Germany, Austria and Luxembourg.
The capital average is an important indicator in Europe, because the number of inhabitants in a country affects the level of facilities available there. However, the statistic is also criticized because it does not take population density into account. After Malta, the Netherlands has the highest population density in the EU. The Netherlands is full, say some politicians.
You can therefore also look at the absolute numbers of asylum migrants. Then a different picture emerges: last year the Netherlands received 35,535 first asylum applications (excluding repeated applications and subsequent travellers), placing it sixth in the EU ranking. The backlog compared to Germany (217,780 applications), France (137,605) and Spain (116,150) was large.
Last year, the Netherlands received 1.05 asylum applications per square kilometer of land area. That is comparable to Belgium (1.06), much more than Germany (0.62) but less than Austria (1.36).
At the end of April, Lelystad unintentionally became the object of the migration debate. ‘77,000 asylum seekers may come to the Netherlands this year’ were the headlines in various media after State Secretary Eric van der Burg released his ministry’s annual forecasts. Expertly compared weblog GeenStijl: ‘A city like Lelystad is included.’
Van der Burg’s estimates caused a shock wave in politics in The Hague. Tens of thousands more asylum applications than in 2022, the year in which asylum seekers slept on the streets in Ter Apel, was a bridge too far. Even in 2015, when Europe was struggling with a refugee crisis, not nearly as many asylum seekers came to the Netherlands.
Tensions in the cabinet rose to a peak. The VVD faction in particular demanded a decrease in the number of asylum seekers and threatened to pull the plug on the cabinet if the coalition did not reach an agreement. The rest is history.
It has been almost six months since State Secretary Van der Burg made the explosive prediction. Even then, experts were raising their eyebrows: where do these sky-high figures come from? Until then, the number of asylum applications had kept pace with a year earlier, when (including repeated applications and subsequent travelers) the counter stood at more than 49,000 applications on December 31.
With two months to go, there are still no more asylum seekers coming to the Netherlands than last year. The number of applications is now approximately one thousand behind the level at the end of October 2022. The chance that the proposed forecast will come true is nil.
That does not mean that it is quiet in the asylum shelter. Even if the number of applications keeps pace with last year, that number is exceptionally high compared to the 10-year average. This is clearly visible in the registration center in Ter Apel, which is almost collapsing under the number of asylum applications. Last weekend, foreigners again slept on chairs in the waiting area of the Immigration Service.
Family reunification turned out to be the stumbling block for the cabinet. The parties could not agree on the restriction of the right to travel in connection with family members of recognized refugees, also known as status holders in jargon.
The question is how much control over migration the government had gained by preventing the return journey of refugees. Last year, approximately 11,000 follow-up travelers came to the Netherlands and the intended package of measures directly affected approximately half of those people: 5,500. That is just over 1 percent of total immigration in 2022.
In the aftermath of the cabinet’s fall, the term ‘reunion on reunification’ was also coined. The piling up of asylum applications whereby family members of refugees who have come over in turn bring family members to the Netherlands. There is no evidence yet for the existence of this ‘asylum stacking’. The Immigration Service (IND) has been investigating since July how often family reunification occurs, but still has no answer.
What is less often discussed is that family migration mainly follows labor migration. Last year, almost 40,000 family migrants from outside the EU came to the Netherlands, a quarter of them in the context of family reunification of refugees.
For every knowledge migrant, an average of one family member comes along, according to documents released last summer after the fall of the government. For every ten (lower educated) labor migrants, 6 family members come along. A large proportion (76 percent) of these family members do not work.
‘The fact that many family migrants come along with labor migrants is important for estimating the costs and benefits of labor migration. For example, attracting labor migrants leads to a greater demand on scarce housing, healthcare and educational facilities due to the family migrants that come with them,’ Pieter van Winden recently analyzed in the economics journal ESB. He is a senior official at the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment.
Politicians from right to left have been united on one migration topic for years: the deportation of rejected asylum seekers. ‘We will smoothen the faltering return of rejected asylum seekers’, GroenLinks-PvdA, for example, promises in its current programme. ‘Illegals should be detained or deported,’ says the PVV. Coalition parties VVD, D66, CDA and CU agreed in their coalition agreement that ‘people who are not lawfully allowed to stay in the Netherlands must return to their country of origin’.
Then the reality. Returning foreigners is becoming increasingly difficult. The responsible Return and Departure Service (DT&V) released this message last July. Every year, the service successfully returns several thousand foreigners, often no more than two thousand of them forcibly. Compared to the arrival of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, this is only a fraction of the total.
In the largest group of ‘outflows’ it is doubtful whether those people have really left the Netherlands. They left ‘independently without supervision’. This means: the foreigner is no longer at the last known address. It is not known where it went.
There is no easy solution because the Netherlands is dependent on the country of origin when returning migrants. The example of Morocco is exemplary. A 2021 deal with the country was sold in politics in The Hague as a ‘breakthrough’ for Dutch migration policy. Finally, Moroccans would be forcibly deported. But after more than a year and a half, the counter stood at 125 Moroccans who had returned. The majority of those people returned to Morocco voluntarily. That was possible before the ‘Morocco deal’ was concluded, even though.
The return of migrants within Europe is also difficult. According to the so-called Dublin Regulation, foreigners often have to return to the country where they first entered the EU. In practice this hardly happens. Last year, 860 persons were demonstrably transferred to a total of 23 EU member states. Politicians have been promising to fix the Dublin scheme for years. No one has succeeded in this yet.
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