Population will grow twice as fast in 2022 due to immigration
This is reported by the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). According to the statistics office, 227,000 inhabitants have been added in the past year, a big difference with the number of 115,000 inhabitants who settled in the Netherlands in 2021. The number of inhabitants in the Netherlands is growing at 17.8 million.
American immigrants
This growth is easy to explain: the high number of immigrants mainly contributes to the sharp increase in the population. In 2022, about 402,000 people came to the Netherlands, about 100,000 migrants from Ukraine. They fled their own country en masse due to the Russian invasion that started in February 2022.
In addition to the migrants from Ukraine, there are also migrants from Syria, Turkey, India and Poland in the Netherlands.
Birth and death rates
The fact that population growth can be fully derived from foreign migration is also evident from the birth and death figures. In 2022, about 168,000 children were born, but about 169,000 people also died.
This excess mortality is a trend that has been developing for several years. In 2002 there was still a death surplus in 13 of the 496 municipalities, whereas this is currently the case in 62 percent of all municipalities (currently 344). Last year, in 2021, there was still a mortality surplus in 53 percent of the municipalities.
Provinces and cities
Flevoland is the province where the population is growing the fastest, followed by North Holland, South Holland and Utrecht. Looking beyond the municipalities, the larger cities in the Netherlands have the most difficulty growing. Eindhoven and Almere had the strongest growth with 22 new people per thousand inhabitants.
Of the big cities that are only in Rotterdam and Breda, slightly below the national middle age. It is striking that from the major cities, especially in the Randstad, but also Groningen and Eindhoven, for example, more people leave the Netherlands than arrive.