Migration and Immigrants: The Case of The Netherlands

1999

Since 1850, thousands of publications have been written about migration to and from the Netherlands. Migration is an important topic for political and social debates, now as well as in the past. The nature of migration changes continuously, as does the way in which migration and integration issues are problematized, and changes are a reason for migration historians to take a fresh look at migrations in the past. Over time, the focus has moved from legal, to demographic, economic, sociological and emancipatory, and back to legal and economic. In recent decades, the analytical and comparative approach has been strengthened: between categories of migrants, between men and women, and between countries. This is the way forward.

Migration profile on the Netherlands - up to date until November 2014. The profile discuss historic and post-war trends in immigration, describes the immigrant population, and provides information on immigration, asylum, citizenship and integration policies.

Current Dutch family migration policies are among the most restrictive in the European Union. (Groenendijk et al 2007b) From the 1990s onwards, the conditions for admission and stay of foreign family members in the Netherlands have gradually been tightened. Most recently, the centre-right government under Premier Balkenende which was in office from 2002 to 2006 implemented a number of significant restrictive reforms. The Law on Integration Abroad (2005) in particular attracted a great deal of attention both within the Netherlands and internationally. This law makes the granting of entry visa to family migrants conditional upon their demonstrating a sufficient level of knowledge of Dutch language and society. The Netherlands were the first country in the world to introduce such integration requirements at entry for foreign family members. (Groenendijk 2005: 12) This paper provides an overview of the main developments in Dutch family migration policies, with a focus on recent years. By way of introduction, it sketches the main trends of immigration to the Netherlands since the Second World War and presents statistical data on migration flows, migrant population and family migration in the Netherlands. The second section traces the history of Dutch family migration policies from the 1950s until the end of the 1990s. Finally, the third section provides an overview of the current policy framework, as well as a discussion of the political debate about family migration in the Netherlands since 2002.

Law and Social Inquiry , 2013

For a long time the Netherlands has been internationally known for its tolerant and humane environment for first- and second-generation migrants. However, as in many European countries, over the past few decades the political debate on immigration has gradually grown more negative. Links between crime, security, migration, and integration have become more established, resulting in a series of policy and legislative reforms targeting migrants in the country. These developments seem to fit into the broader trend for which scholars have coined the term crimmigration, the intersection of crime control and immigration control. In this article, using crimmigration as a sensitizing concept, we seek to gain insight into the governance of migration and crime in Netherlands.

2005

Migration today is one of the issues on top of the political agendas of most industrialised countries. For countries of destination, the control of immigration is a matter of exercise of state sovereignty and a key prerequisite for the public support for state policies. Traditionally, ...

2016

There is much demand for information on migration motives, not only for the purpose of government policies, but also for statistical purposes, such as population forecasting. However, information on the purpose of migration is lacking in many countries. In the Netherlands, migration statistics are based on information from the municipal population registers, but motives of immigrants are not recorded in these registers. Therefore, additional data on migration motives from the Central Register of non-Dutch nationals of the Ministry of Justice has been used. The data from this Central Register of non-Dutch nationals has, at the individual level, been linked with data from the local population registers. The combination of data from the two sources offered a better perception of the relation between asylum migration and subsequent family reunion. The size of family reunion migration caused by asylum migrants is still relatively modest. It appears that family reunion often takes place o...

Regional Studies, 2008

The initial settlement behaviour and the subsequent mobility of immigrants who arrived in the Netherlands in 1999 are examined using rich administrative individual data. The study considers the settlement patterns of immigrants from various countries of origin who entered the country as labour, family or asylum migrants. The evidence suggests distinct settlement trajectories for asylum and other non-western immigrants. The presence of co-ethnics and members of other ethnic minorities, but also socioeconomic neighbourhood characteristics, appear to play an important role in determining location choice. Differences in the settlement and spatial mobility patterns of immigrants with various degrees of distance from the native Dutch in terms of human and financial capital, proficiency in the relevant language(s), and religion confirm the main predictions of spatial assimilation theory.