Immigration to the Netherlands is a historic process that has been underway for centuries as people have arrived to the Low Countries from different parts of Europe and even further afield from places like the Middle East, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. In medieval times, what are now the Netherlands formed the more northerly parts of the Seventeen Provinces of the Low Countries along with modern-day Belgium, Luxembourg and parts of north-eastern France. These were always commercial centers that were controlled by Burgundy and Spain between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. The northern provinces then broke away to form the Dutch Republic as a result of the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) against Spain. Afterwards the Dutch Republic became an extremely cosmopolitan commercial and colonial power, something which drew migrants to cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam. For instance, the Dutch Republic became a haven for Sephardic Jewish people from Spain and Portugal. In more modern times the Netherlands have experienced extensive immigration from some of the country’s former colonies like Surinam in South America, while a substantial émigré community of Moroccans and Turks also arrived in the 1960s and 1970s.[1]
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Immigration to the Netherlands chronology of eventsImmigration to the Netherlands chronology of events
The Netherlands is a country with a complex history. In ancient times the Low Countries was broadly known as Frisia, a low-lying marshy region on the edge of the Roman Empire. In medieval times it formed part of the Carolingian empire before the Low Countries fragmented into a large number of different principalities ruled over by Counts or Lords like the Count of Holland, the Count of Flanders and the Count of Hainault. Over time Europeans came to view the Low Countries as consisting of Seventeen Provinces like Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht in the north, and Flanders, Luxembourg and Hainault in the south. The powerful dukes of Burgundy conquered most of these states in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, when the last Duke of Burgundy of the direct male line, Charles the Bold, died in 1477, his lands passed to the Austrian House of Habsburg. Then, through a circuitous marriage arrangement between the Spanish Royal House of Trastámara and the Habsburgs, the Seventeen Provinces became the territorial possession of the Spanish Habsburgs in the early sixteenth century.[2]
This would all have consequences for Dutch migration before long. After the Protestant Reformation began in Germany in 1517, it soon spread to the Seventeen Provinces. By the 1560s there were growing tensions between the Spanish rulers there and their Dutch and Belgian subjects. War broke out in 1568, the Eighty Years’ War. Though it lasted eight decades, in reality by the 1580s, with English aid, the northern provinces in what are now the Netherlands had managed to firmly establish their independence as the Protestant Dutch Republic, while the more southerly Catholic provinces around Belgium, Luxembourg and pockets of what are now north-eastern France, remained under Spanish rule as the Spanish Netherlands.[3] They would later revert to Austrian control in the eighteenth century after the War of the Spanish Succession before Belgium finally established its independence in 1830.[4]
The creation of an independent Dutch Republic had immediate consequences for migration into the Netherlands. For starters, the Dutch became the foremost trading and mercantile power in Europe from the late sixteenth century onwards. They were also one of the most liberal states in Europe at the time. Jewish people (particularly Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal) sought refuge in the cities of the Dutch Republic. Baruch Spinoza, for instance, one of the foremost European philosophers of the seventeenth century was of Portuguese Jewish heritage. His ancestors left Portugal in the sixteenth century and eventually settled in Amsterdam.[5] Equally, some Germans who adhered to Baptism, Anabaptism and other radical forms of Protestantism settled in the Dutch Republic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[6]
The Dutch were also establishing an overseas colonial empire from the very start of the seventeenth century. Before it became New York, the European colony at the southern tip of Manhattan was New Amsterdam, a Dutch colony. The Cape Colony (modern-day Cape Town), the first permanent European colony in what is now South Africa, was established by the Dutch in the 1650s. And the Dutch also emerged as the foremost power in the East Indies, ruling over most of what is now Indonesia for approximately 300 years. Finally, the Dutch colonized several islands of the Caribbean like Curacao and also carved out a colony on the northern mainland of South America, what was known as Dutch Guiana and which we call Suriname today.[7]
These colonies would have a bearing on Dutch immigration after the Second World War. In the decades following the conflict, the Netherlands, as with other nations like Germany and Britain, experienced labor shortages. The Dutch encouraged immigration from Dutch Guiana, by then known as Suriname, to meet their labor needs. They also began to take in ‘guest workers’ from Turkey (a practice that was followed in Germany too) and quite uniquely from Morocco. Hence, over time cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, the Hague and Utrecht have developed complex immigrant communities in the Netherlands. These have been further augmented by the arrival of new European groups like the Poles following the large European Union expansion of 2004 and also the migration waves following conflicts like the Syrian and Libyan Civil Wars in the 2010s.[8]
Extent of immigration to the NetherlandsExtent of immigration to the Netherlands
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The extent and kinds of immigration to the Dutch Republic/the Netherlands between 1568, when the country began to achieve its independence from Spain, and the modern period, has varied greatly. For instance, the migration of Sephardic Jewish people from countries like Spain and Portugal to the Dutch Republic in late sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries involved thousands of people. This is relatively small numerically by comparison with many mass migrations of the modern world, but it was substantial in providing a location where Jewish people in Western Europe could avoid the kind of persecutory laws which the Spanish had introduced from the 1490s onwards following the end of the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula.[9]
The modern migration of groups like the Surinamese, Moroccans and Turks to the Netherlands from the late 1940s to the 1970s involved hundreds of thousands of people as the Netherlands looked for additional workers during a period of considerable rebuilding and growth following the Second World War in Europe. In recent decades there have been overlapping waves of migration for different reasons. For instance, in 2004, prior to the huge enlargement of the European Union that year, there were only around 20,000 Polish people living in the Netherlands. This number grew quickly to 45,000 by 2005 as workers from these new EU countries were able to travel to, work and live in more established member states. The number reached nearly 100,000 by the end of 2007. Thereafter the Polish migration slowed as a consequence of the Great Financial Crisis that began in September 2008. By the end of the 2010s, there were approximately 135,000 Poles in the Netherlands. Thus, over 100,000 Polish people immigrated to the Netherlands in the decade and a half between 2004 and 2019.[10]
Demographic impact of immigration to the NetherlandsDemographic impact of immigration to the Netherlands
The demographic impact of immigration to the Netherlands varies. About three-quarters of all people in the country identify as being Dutch. The largest demographics are then Moroccans, Surinamese, Turks, people from what is now Indonesia, Middle Eastern groups, especially the Kurdish people, along with Germans and Poles.[11] These groups collectively make up about 2.25 million people out of the 18 million inhabitants of the Netherlands. Of these, Moroccan Dutch people make up over 400,000 people, while the Surinamese community makes up about 2% of the population of the country, approximately 360,000.[12]
While groups like the Poles, Kurds and Syrians have increased in the early twenty-first century because of the expansion of the European Union and geopolitical migration crises in the Middle East following the Arab Spring of 2011, the one community that has declined substantially in the Netherlands in modern times is the Dutch Jewish community. At the time of the outbreak of the Second World War, there were around 140,000 Jewish Dutch people living in the Netherlands (closer to 160,000 were registered by the Nazis depending on marital arrangements). The country was under the governance of the Nazi hard-liner, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, for most of the period from 1940 to 1945 and nearly three-quarters of the country’s Jewish people were victims of the Holocaust. The Netherlands’ Jewish community is consequently only about 35,000 people strong today.[13]
See alsoSee also
Explore more about immigration to the NetherlandsExplore more about immigration to the Netherlands
- Netherlands, Telephone Directories records collection on MyHeritage
- Netherlands, Population Registers, 1810-1936 records collection on MyHeritage
- Netherlands, Civil Births, 1811-1915 records collection on MyHeritage
- Netherlands, Civil Marriages, 1811-1940 records collection on MyHeritage
- Netherlands, Notarial Records, 1600-1935 records collection on MyHeritage
- Netherlands, Civil Deaths, 1811-1965 records collection on MyHeritage
- Researching Your Dutch Ancestors at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Researching Dutch Family History Around the World at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Hulp van DNA bij Surinaams familie onderzoek at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/migration-netherlands-rhetoric-and-perceived-reality-challenge-dutch-tolerance
- ↑ Wim Blockmans and Walter Prevenier, The Promised Lands: The Low Countries under Burgundian Rule, 1369–1530, trans. by Lizabeth Fackelmans and ed. by Edward Peters (Philadelphia, 1999).
- ↑ https://www.worldhistory.org/Eighty_Years%27_War/
- ↑ https://www.thecollector.com/belgian-revolution-independence-movement-surprised-europe/
- ↑ Jonathan Israel, ‘Sephardic Immigration into the Dutch Republic, 1595–1672’, in Studia Rosenthaliana, Vol. 23 (Fall, 1989), pp. 45–53.
- ↑ Mary S. Sprunger, ‘From Communalism to Capitalism’, in Revue de l’histoire des religions, Vol. 237, No. 4 (October – December, 2020), pp. 675–703.
- ↑ Pieter C. Emmer and Jos J. L. Gommans (eds), The Dutch Overseas Empire, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020).
- ↑ https://www.gfmd.org/sites/g/files/tmzbdl1801/files/pfp/mp/CP11_Netherlands.pdf
- ↑ Israel, ‘Sephardic Immigration’.
- ↑ Dominika Pszczolkowska, ‘The Netherlands: The Second-Best Destination’, in Dominika Pszczolkowska, How Migrants Choose Their Destinations (Abingdon, 2024), pp. 151–165.
- ↑ https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/12877/NL
- ↑ Simona Vezzoli,’The evolution of Surinamese emigration across and beyond independence’, Determinants of International Migration, Project Paper 28 (2014).
- ↑ https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-netherlands