A growing anxiety around expected labour shortages in key sectors is influencing Dutch politics. This preoccupation is grounded in the rapid ageing of the Dutch population: the number of retirees is rising faster than the number of young people entering the labour market. Crucial sectors such as agriculture, horticulture, distribution centres, meat processing and hospitality already rely structurally on labour migration. Another essential yet often overlooked category is domestic labour – cleaning, childcare, and elderly care – much of which takes place informally, outside regulatory frameworks and therefore under heightened risk of exploitation.
The current debate around labour migration often suggests that this dependence is specific to our time. It is not. Dutch history shows centuries of labour movement in and out of the country. A well-known example is the 1960s, when the Dutch state actively recruited Turkish and Moroccan workers to fill shortages in heavy industry and agriculture. When the economy contracted in the 1970s, that recruitment policy was abruptly halted. This pattern reveals an old logic: migrant workers are welcomed when convenient and disregarded when no longer economically needed. The value assigned to their presence rises and falls with fluctuations in the labour market, not with their humanity.
Labour migrants perform essential work that allows the Dutch economy to function and prosper as it does. And yet anti-migration sentiment in society is growing, fuelled by extreme-right parties whose racist rhetoric increasingly seeps into mainstream discourse. This climate is not new; it continues a longer history of xenophobia and institutional racism rooted in the Netherlands’ colonial past. These attitudes are now completely normalised in public debate and the political system.
This tension between the Dutch economy’s reliance on migrant labour and the distaste for migrant workers becomes painfully visible in current Dutch politics. On 4 July 2025, the Dutch parliament approved the Emergency Asylum Measures Act, which, among other measures, criminalises “stay without valid papers”. In practice, it turns undocumented life into a punishable offence — even though many Dutch sectors depend precisely on undocumented and semi-documented workers to fill labour gaps. Rather than improving their rights or conditions, political interventions deepen their vulnerability. This contradiction is further highlighted by the redaction of the plans proposed by Eddy van Huijm by the demissionary VVD minister Mariëlle Paul to improve the living conditions of migrant workers. The legal proposal of van Hijum (former NSC), who had spent around a year and a half investigating how to improve the living conditions of labour migrants, was quietly redacted one day after the previous national elections. It shows that the precarity of migrant workers is known, understood, and thoroughly documented; the decision to overlook it appears to be deliberate.
However, beyond these economic and technical debates lies something more fundamental. Increasingly, labour is spoken of as if it were a product, neglecting the social fact that an actual person is performing the work. Migrants are routinely labelled “gelukszoekers” (fortune seekers), a term loaded with suspicion and disdain, suggesting they come only for personal economic gain.
This framing, however, prevents us from asking harder questions: Why do people leave home? What global inequalities and colonial structures shape those decisions? What role do states like the Netherlands and the migrants’ states of origin play in creating the very conditions that push people to migrate? By refusing to address these questions, we reproduce a system in which labour migrants are caught on both sides of the same oppressive coin: they face systemic precarity in the countries they leave behind, and another form of systemic precarity in the countries to which they travel.
Having described part of the current state of labour migration in the Netherlands, it is important to add something that is often overlooked: a growing number of migrant workers are female. Typically, they work in the domestic labour sector, which is historically perceived to be female work and predominantly takes place in private homes. In turn, they are more ‘hidden’ and individualised, making them more prone to exploitation and making it more difficult to organise and resist. In addition, they are more vulnerable to sexual abuse.
It is within these systems of oppression that women migrant workers navigate their lives. Their labour is indispensable yet undervalued; their presence is necessary yet contested. And despite these conditions, they continue to show forms of resistance — through community building, collective care, storytelling, and protest.
Do you want to hear more about the human side of labour migration and the ways women migrant workers resist their exploitation? Join Leaving Home on the 15th of December, an evening in which we discuss the aforementioned questions, read personal stories and take part in a letter-writing workshop to show solidarity.
