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, the decrease is almost entirely due to knowledge migrants – 16,000 fewer expats chose our country last year. 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. CBS investigated the reasons why people came to the Netherlands.
According to CBS expert Tanja Traag, the largest group consists of people who came to live here for work or for family. In the latter case, about half are “people who came here for love, for example, because they met a Dutch person abroad.”
Traag based the distribution on figures from 2023 that have just been released. People from outside the EU have to state their reasons for coming to the Nehterlands when applying for their visa, but for people from EU and EFTA countries (Liechtenstein, Norway, Iceland, and Switzerland), their motivation only becomes clear after a year. Of all 335,000 immigrants in 2023, 21 percent came for work, 22 percent for family, 12 percent for study, and 10 percent for asylum.
Of the 73,000 people who came to the Nehterlands for family in 2023, 40 percent followed a labor migrant. 5 percent followed a study migrant, and 7 percent followed an asylum seeker to the Netherlands.