Asylum Policy in the Netherlands — Two Crises, Rarely Discussed Together

Asylum applications are falling. Anti-migrant politics is rising. A shrinking workforce sits underneath both stories.

24,073

first-time asylum applications in 2025, down roughly 8,000 from 2024, even as the political debate intensified

1.4

children per Dutch woman in 2024, well below the 2.1 needed to keep the population stable without migration

For the first time

Dutch residents aged 65 and over now outnumber those under 20, a milestone CBS confirmed in late 2025

More than half

of companies in transport, cleaning, and security report regular staff shortages, even as unemployment ticks up elsewhere
Asylum Policy in the Netherlands, refugees, children
NL
Two things are true about the Netherlands at the same time, and Dutch political debate rarely lets them sit in the same sentence. Anti-migrant sentiment has moved to the center of national politics, helping collapse one government and shape the next. And the Netherlands, like nearly every wealthy country on earth, is aging faster than it is having children, a demographic reality that makes some level of continued migration not a political choice but an arithmetic one. This page tries to hold both facts at once, with the most current data available, rather than letting either side of the debate borrow only the numbers that suit it.

What Is Actually Happening with Asylum Right Now

The headline political story and the headline numerical story are pulling in different directions. The Netherlands received 24,073 first-time asylum applications in 2025, around 8,000 fewer than in 2024, continuing a decline rather than a surge. That fall happened during the same period in which the previous government collapsed over migration policy, a new government was formed, and asylum law was rewritten more aggressively than at almost any point in Dutch history.

The politics moved fastest. The Schoof cabinet, with Geert Wilders’ PVV as its largest party, declared what it called an “asylum crisis” in September 2024 and pursued what then-Minister Marjolein Faber called the strictest asylum policy ever, ending state-funded housing for rejected applicants and proposing to make undocumented residence a criminal offence. That government collapsed in June 2025 when the PVV withdrew over the pace of its own asylum agenda. The Netherlands held snap elections, and a new, very different coalition, D66, the VVD, and the CDA under Prime Minister Rob Jetten, took office in February 2026.

What happened next complicates any simple left-versus-right story about Dutch asylum politics. Jetten’s government, generally seen as centrist rather than hard-right, confirmed it would carry forward most of the previous administration’s asylum measures, including a two-tier protection system that gives war refugees fewer rights than those granted asylum for individual persecution. When the Dutch Senate rejected a flagship piece of Faber-era legislation in April 2026, the bill that would have criminalised undocumented residence, it was Jetten himself who called the vote a “real missed opportunity” and promised new restrictions within two weeks. By June 2026, his cabinet was preparing replacement measures covering many of the same goals the original bill had failed to achieve. Whatever else is true about Dutch asylum politics in 2026, it is no longer accurate to describe it as one hard-right government against a moderate opposition. The restrictive direction has, so far, survived a change of government largely intact.

The Demographic Arithmetic Underneath the Debate

Here is the part of the conversation that rarely makes it into the same news cycle as asylum politics. The Netherlands’ own statistical agency confirmed, in a report released in December 2025, that people aged 65 and over now outnumber young people under 20 for the first time in the country’s history. Dutch women had an average of 1.4 children in 2024, down from 1.6 to 1.8 in the late 1970s, well below the 2.1 needed to keep a population stable without migration. One in five Dutch women now remain childless. CBS’s own population forecast is explicit about the mechanism: the population is still growing, but in recent years that growth has come almost entirely from migration, not from births, and deaths are expected to outnumber births in the Netherlands every year until at least 2029.

This is not a uniquely Dutch story, and it is worth seeing the wider pattern to understand why. Italy, governed by a right-wing coalition under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni that has been consistently tough on illegal immigration, announced in mid-2025 that it would issue nearly 500,000 new work visas for non-EU nationals through 2028. Italy’s population fell by 37,000 the previous year, with 281,000 more deaths than births, a pattern that has held for over a decade; the Bank of Italy has estimated the country needs to attract roughly 10 million immigrants by 2050 just to keep its population from shrinking further.

Germany shows the same contradiction in an even sharper form. The far-right AfD took a strong second place nationally in the February 2025 federal election, built substantially on anti-immigration politics, and no mainstream party has been willing to govern with it. At the very same time, the centre-right government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz has kept expanding legal labour migration rather than restricting it: nearly 200,000 work visas were issued in 2024 alone, the EU Blue Card’s salary thresholds and list of eligible shortage occupations were widened for 2026, and a new national Work-and-Stay Agency launched specifically to make it faster and easier for foreign professionals to come and stay. The need is starkest in care work: more than 300,000 foreign care workers have arrived in Germany in recent years, and researchers are blunt that without them the sector would collapse outright. As one labour market analysis put it bluntly in early 2026, however much the country’s far right may object, Germany’s labour market currently grows only because of immigration. The Netherlands, Italy, and Germany are, in this respect, telling close to the same story in three different accents.

Where the Dutch Labour Market Actually Needs People

The connection between an aging population and a need for foreign workers is not abstract. Dutch employers struggled to fill 45% of vacancies in 2025, concentrated specifically in construction, healthcare, and technical roles. The most acute and persistent shortages, according to Statistics Netherlands’ own employer surveys, sit in transport and in business services such as security, cleaning, and temporary staffing, where more than half of companies regularly cannot find enough staff. This is happening even though over 76% of working-age Dutch residents are already employed or actively looking for work, one of the highest labour participation rates in Europe; there are, in a meaningful sense, not many more domestic workers left to recruit into these specific roles.

It is worth being precise here rather than overstating the case in either direction. The Dutch labour market has cooled somewhat through 2026, with unemployment ticking up and, for the first time since 2021, slightly more job seekers than open vacancies overall. The shortage is not universal across the whole economy. But in the specific sectors tied most directly to an aging population, healthcare, long-term care, and the lower-paid service roles that keep daily life running, the gap between demand and domestic supply remains structural rather than cyclical, and is expected to widen as the country’s “second aging wave,” in the demographers’ own phrase, deepens through the 2030s.

Defining Key Terms

Refugees

Refugees are people officially recognised under international law as having fled their home country due to persecution. The 1951 Geneva Convention protects them, and recognition grants legal status and rights in the host country.

Asylum Seekers

Asylum seekers have applied for protection and are awaiting a decision. Officials review each case to determine whether it meets the legal threshold for refugee status. Many live for months or years in uncertainty during this process; the average Dutch waiting time climbed to 67 weeks in 2025.

Migrants

Migrants move from one country to another for any reason, economic opportunity, family, study, or climate pressure among them. Not all migrants are asylum seekers, and not all asylum seekers are eventually recognised as refugees. The labour migrants discussed in this page’s demographic section, highly skilled workers, healthcare staff, seasonal labour, are a legally and statistically distinct category from people seeking asylum, even though public debate often blurs the two together.

Labour Migration

Labour migration describes people who move specifically to work, recruited through legal channels such as the Highly Skilled Migrant programme or the EU Blue Card. It operates under entirely different rules, timelines, and political framing than asylum, even when the underlying demographic logic, an aging population needing workers, connects to the same national conversation.

RYB’s Place in This Picture

RYB does not have a position on how many asylum seekers any country should admit; that is a legitimate political question shaped by capacity, law, and values that reasonable people weigh differently. What this page tries to do, consistent with every other page in RYB’s data section, is keep two true things visible at once rather than letting the loudest version of either one stand in for the whole picture. The Netherlands’ asylum politics have moved sharply rightward and largely stayed there across a change of government. The Netherlands also has fewer young people than old people for the first time in its history, and several of its most essential, least glamorous sectors already depend on workers the domestic population is not supplying. Both facts are true on the same June afternoon. A national conversation that only ever discusses one of them is not describing the country that actually exists.

Looking Forward

Dutch asylum policy will keep tightening in the near term; that direction has now survived one government collapse and looks set to survive a change of governing coalition as well. The demographic pressure underneath it will not loosen on a comparable timeline. CBS’s own forecasts show the “aging wave” still building through the 2030s, with no plausible birth-rate recovery on the horizon, which means the conversation about who does the Netherlands’ caregiving, cleaning, and construction work is not going away even as the conversation about who is allowed to seek asylum gets harder. RYB may build a dedicated page on migration as a global phenomenon, as a child of Global Development, since the contradiction described here is not a Dutch peculiarity but a pattern repeating, with local variations, across most of the wealthy world. For now, this page exists to make sure that whoever reads it leaves knowing both halves of the Dutch story, not just the half that was loudest this month.

Sources

Government and Official Statistics
News and Analysis
Demographic Data
International Comparison
Research and NGO Sources
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