Scarcely a day goes by without someone making sweeping statements about a highly diverse group of people who happen to live in the Netherlands. The hapless international resident โ or expat โ has become a convenient scapegoat, writes Ben Coates.
When refugees from the southern Netherlands began flooding into the north in the late sixteenth century, locals in Amsterdam didnโt always offer a warm welcome. โThis is what itโs like among the people of Brabant, men as well as womenโ, the poet Gerbrand Bredero grumbled. โThey put on airs like cosmopolitan gentlemen and ladies, but they havenโt a penny in their purseโ.
More than four centuries later, the complaints are a little different. Talk to people in Amsterdam (or elsewhere in the country) today and youโll often hear similar complaints: expats are overpaid, inconsiderate and antisocial; treating the Netherlands as merely a convenient base where they can buy up Dutch houses at extortionate prices in between their trips to Davos.
โThey are parasitesโ, one Amsterdammer told a focus group last year. โThey suck the blood from the cityโ. That was an extreme view โ but itโs sadly not unusual to meet people who think all expats are money-grabbing careerists with the cultural sensitivity of Donald Trump at a Mexican wedding.
Sadly, it also seems that such sentiments may be becoming more common. In Britain, there was clear evidence that racism and discrimination increased after the 2016 Brexit vote, as people who held xenophobic views felt emboldened to share them more loudly.
It seems the same may now be happening here following Geert Wildersโ election victory in November. Several expats Iโve spoken to told me theyโd felt a marked shift in local attitudes towards them recently.
And theyโre probably not alone: last month, the Intelligence Group warned that a โWilders effectโ was making the Netherlands less attractive to foreign workers and investors. โWe donโt have a good image as an attractive country to work inโ, the CEO leading the study said.
In the media, meanwhile, foreign residents are a regular punch bag, with many commentators delighting at stories like the recent one about an Amsterdam expat who asked for the ancient bells of the Westerkerk church to be silenced โso that we could all enjoy the beauty of the cathedral without the inconvenience of noiseโ.
Politicians also delight in denouncing foreigners whoโve been impudent enough to come and work or study here. Geert Wildersโ PVV, for example, has complained that big companies which hire expats โbenefit from the beautiful infrastructure, the well-educated population, and the good care for their expats, but they contribute nothing [to the Dutch economy]โ.
Free movement of labour
Wildersโ election manifesto called for not just a reduction in the number of asylum seekers, but an end to free movement of labour within the EU. In the mainstream, Mark Rutteโs VVD party has also veered wildly between trying to attract foreigners on some days (including paying millions to get the European Medicines Agency to relocate to Amsterdam) and denouncing them on other days, arguing that โthe inflow is nowโฆ too high [and] we therefore want more control over who comesโ.
Even the ostensibly centrist figure of Peter Omtzigt (one of the power brokers behind current coalition negotiations) has said Dutch should become the only language of instruction at Dutch universities and far fewer international students should come here.
โExpats run the [housing] market in Amsterdamโ, Omtzigt says. There are not many things Dutch people agree on these days, but talking tough on expats and international students is about as popular as pancakes and the Efteling.
Some critiques are valid. Yes, too many expats move to the Netherlands and fail to learn Dutch or befriend locals, even after several years here. Yes, large numbers of expats and tourists can distort the economy in some places. Yes, the so-called โ30% ruleโ (which enables some foreign workers to reduce their tax bills) may be too generous.
Yes, thereโs sometimes an unfair distinction between โexpatsโ and โimmigrantsโ, with an Irishman who moves here viewed very differently than a Syrian. And yes, the expat who complained about the church bells was, as the locals would say, as crazy as a door.
However, many of the most popular critiques donโt stand up at all. The most common complaint about expats is that they drive up house prices, but thereโs actually very little evidence that this is the case. Rapid growth in Dutch house prices has many causes, including a lack of new homes being built, historically low interest rates, predatory investing and a shortage of social housing.
Expat demand for housing probably also plays a role, but not a dominant one. As the UN rapporteur on housing reported recently: โHighly-qualified expatriates employed in specific industries or international organisations may pose some competition which can, in specific areas, drive up housing prices, but this is not, by all available evidence, the cause of the general housing crisis in the Netherlandsโ.
Itโs also notable that the number of immigrants/expats in the Netherlands began rising sharply in the 1960s and has increased steadily for years โ but house prices only started really spiking more recently. Most expats live in a few big cities in the west of the country, and saying theyโre the reason you canโt afford a flat in Zutphen or Woerden is like saying Jeff Bezos is rich because I bought a biro on Amazon last month.
Damaging the econony?
Equally fantastical is the idea that expats are damaging the Dutch economy. Just last month, Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot said that โexpats bring very great added value to the Dutch economyโฆ [and] it is up to the government to make sure the Netherlands remains an attractive place for this sort of economic activity, which makes a major contribution to our growth and our prosperityโ.
There are currently 114 vacancies in the Dutch labour market for every 100 people without work, and immigrant labour helps fill the gap. ASML โ the giant chipmaker which is one of the greatest Dutch commercial success stories โ recently threatened to leave the country over difficulties hiring workers from abroad.
โIf we canโt get the people here, weโll get the people elsewhere and then weโll move the operations elsewhere. Itโs that simpleโ, CEO Peter Wennink said. โBe careful about what you wish for,โ Wennink told politicians calling for reduced immigration. โWe will go where we can grow.โ
Leaving home
This week, the maritime engineering giant Boskalis also said it was moving part of its headquarters to the Middle East and would consider leaving the Netherlands for good later this year. โWe have operations all over the world but the fact we are building up a regional HQ in Abu Dhabi has more to do with parliamentโs plans to limit the number of highly skilled workers moving to the Netherlands and the shortage of technical staff,โ CEO Peter Berdowski said.
You might think that forcing a water technology company to go and work in a desert would be a clear signal that Dutch immigration policy is flawed, but sadly the protest seems to have fallen on deaf ears. Anyone making the case for expats in public is about as popular as a Feyenoord fan in the Ajax stands.
To be clear: The Netherlands is still, on the whole, a fantastically welcoming place, and many newcomers donโt experience any prejudice. However, media coverage and political debate has an increasingly ugly undertone, and it seems very likely that the next government will move to reduce the number of foreigners living here, including by curbing the use of English in universities and imposing tighter controls on immigration.
People who think this strengthens the country are wrong. Many foreigners โ expats, immigrants, foreign students, whatever you want to call them โ love this country dearly. Immigration isnโt always a problem; it can be an opportunity. And an openness to the wider world is one of the things which made this country what it is. The Dutch close the door at their peril.