Nearly 70 percent of practically educated Dutch people see immigration as a threat to Dutch society. Almost half of this group is very concerned about the pressure of migration on the housing market, healthcare and education.
This is evident from an analysis of the data from latest edition of an ongoing quarterly study by think tank The Hague Center for Strategic Studies (HCSS) into social stability in the Netherlands.
Among theoretically trained people and young people, forty percent agree with the statement ‘immigration threatens Dutch society’. This applies to more than half of the entire Dutch population.
Similar sentiment on migration also emerged from the previous HCSS poll, alongside broad support for autocratic leadership and preferential treatment for people born in the Netherlands. Residents of the Netherlands also still cite international migration flows as the greatest geopolitical threat to the security and stability of the country.
What is new is that Dutch people now also mention migration as the greatest internal, social threat. Sentiment about migration has therefore become slightly more negative in recent times.
Increased tensions
“Now that the campaign season has started again, more attention is being paid to migration,” is the statement of Monique Kremer, chairman of the Migration Advisory Council. The elections for the House of Representatives will take place at the end of October. “Increased international tensions – think of Trump and Russia – make people feel threatened,” Kremer continues. “That in turn influences our thinking about themes such as migration.”
Migration has been a prominent theme in politics for years. In 2023, the Rutte IV cabinet fell over a migration issue, after which the PVV won the subsequent elections with an anti-migration agenda. Last week, in a hearing, the Senate considered a proposal from the outgoing Schoof cabinet on tightening asylum legislation. It is likely that the first major election debate on TV on Sunday will focus a lot on migration.
Migration is also an important theme elsewhere in society, as shown by the (violent) protests against asylum policy in recent weeks. Another anti-immigration demonstration is planned in Amsterdam on Sunday. Migration “quickly evokes emotions,” notes Marcel Lubbers, professor of Interdisciplinary Social Science at Utrecht University. “People see a lot of change and experience it as a threat. Migration is often seen as the source of the threat.”
This applies much more to one group than to the other, according to the data analysis. People with a practical education see migration as an international threat almost twice as often as people with a theoretical education. “Practically educated people experience more competition with migrants who live in the same neighborhood or work in the same sector,” Lubbers explains. According to him, people with a college or university degree more often have an international worldview: “They attach less importance to what a country means and therefore feel less threatened by migration.”
Mirror image
For conservative Dutch people, migration is the greatest international threat, while climate change ranks tenth for them. For progressive Dutch people it is exactly the other way around. “Truly a mirror image,” says researcher Jaco Dagevos of the Social and Cultural Planning Office (SCP): “The difference in social vision largely determines the difference in view of social cohesion and the extent to which it would be threatened by migration.”
According to Lubbers, the fact that young people feel less threatened by migration is partly because relatively many of them are theoretically trained: “In addition, the younger generation has more contact with people with a migration background. This also allows young people to be more positive about migration.”
Broken down by political preference, almost all people who voted for FvD, PVV and JA21 in 2023 see migration as a threat to Dutch society. They are also most concerned about the pressure on homes, hospitals and schools due to migration. Only ten percent of voters from Denk, PvdD and GroenLinks-PvdA see immigration as a threat to society.
Differences
However, the differences between groups should not be exaggerated, says Professor Lubbers. People with a migration background are less negative about migration than people without foreign roots, but the difference (4 percentage points) is smaller “than you might expect.” There are also many differences within groups. Young people may be relatively positive about migration, “there are also relatively many PVV votes in this age group.” Two out of five theoretically trained people also (completely) agree with the statement that migration is a threat, just as much as the opponents among them.
“Few people are only for or against migration,” says SCP researcher Dagevos. “People often have concerns about migration, but they believe, for example, that real refugees are welcome – or labor migrants who help the Netherlands with shortages in the labor market. It is a mixture of arguments for and against, of concerns and feelings of so-and-so-may-come.”
On balance, the Dutch have been slightly positive about immigration for years, according to the biennial survey among the European population, the European Social Survey. When asked whether migration makes their country a worse or better place, Dutch people choose ‘better’ slightly more often than ‘worse’. On a scale of 10, this results in a score of 5.5, comparable to previous years. The Netherlands is therefore somewhat more positive than neighboring countries and much more positive than countries in Eastern Europe. “In Western Europe, where there has been experience with migration for a long time, the basic attitude about migration is stable and slightly positive,” says Dagevos.
The fact that migration is seen as such a threat is because politicians have put it on the agenda as a socially urgent issue. “As a result, negative sentiments dominate the cocktail of positive views and major concerns,” says Dagevos.
Political agenda
In the 1990s, mixed feelings about migration were barely put on the political agenda. “That has changed,” says Lubbers, just like the type of threat attributed to migration. “In the 1990s, migrants were seen as competitors on the labor market. Now it is about migration as a cultural threat and competition on the housing market.”
Indeed, there are comments about the latter in the HCSS poll, such as the call from one respondent: “Provide our own people with houses first, etc.” The threat to security and stability is not further described in the poll. Nor is a distinction made between asylum migration, which dominates the debate, and labor migration, which is much larger.
“The group of labor migrants has quadrupled in size in recent decades,” says Kremer of the Migration Advisory Council. “Citizens will become concerned if many more migrants arrive in a short time.” That is why the Advisory Council last year made numerous recommendations to regulate labor migration, taking into account “social cohesion” in the country. Kremer: “Unfortunately, politicians have not yet taken up those recommendations.”
The outgoing cabinet is now working on the rapid introduction of a much stricter asylum policy. “While calm is needed in the implementation of asylum policy and we must prepare for the European migration pact that will come into effect in June next year,” says Kremer. This pact should regulate the European asylum influx more tightly. “If asylum seekers integrate, work and contribute to society, citizens’ concerns will diminish.”
With the cooperation of Winny de Jong
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