The population of the Netherlands increased by about 191 thousand people to 17.8 million inhabitants in the first three quarters of 2022, the population growth, which was more than twice as high as in the same period of the previous year, was mainly caused by immigration, the English-language Dutch news portal NLTimes announced on Thursday.
Citing data from the Dutch statistical office CBS, the news portal said that by the end of September, around 317,900 immigrants had settled in the Netherlands, and around 129,400 people had moved out of the country. The Dutch population increase is almost 2.5 times higher than in the same period of 2021, they wrote.
Refugees from the war in Ukraine accounted for nearly one-third of the immigrants who caused the population growth, which is expected to be considered temporary. More than 97,000 people have arrived in the Netherlands from Ukraine since the start of the war on February 24. It was noted that not counting the refugees from Ukraine, according to the statistics, the country had about 102,500 immigrants, which was still more than 22,000 more than the data recorded in the same period of the previous year.
Immigrants from other European countries contributed about 47,000 to the Dutch population growth, as about 90,000 EU citizens arrived and 53,000 left the country. The number of people arriving from Asia (49 thousand), Africa, and North America (14 thousand) was also significant. According to Statistics Netherlands, the number of immigrants from Asia was higher in the third quarter than in the whole of last year. While the number of Asian immigrants decreased sharply during the years of the coronavirus epidemic, it is increasing again this year, they said.
They also said that 14 percent of the people living in the Netherlands, almost 2.5 million people, were born abroad and came to the Netherlands as immigrants. Another 11.4 percent of the population were born in the Netherlands as children of second-generation immigrants.
Natural population growth – the number of births minus the number of deaths – was low but positive in the Netherlands in the first nine months of the year.
This year, 179,441 thousand children were born in the Netherlands slightly less than the previous year. The death rate was relatively high and exceeded the figures recorded in the same period of 2020 and 2021, at the height of the coronavirus epidemic. By September, about 2,500 more children were born than people died in the country, the Dutch news portal added in its report.
MTI
