Go West

Read in NRC Handelsblad 0f 21 August 2015:

The number of expats in Amstelveen , the southern suburb of Amsterdam, has doubled over the last ten years. You could read it in NRC Handelsblad last summer. The newspaper quoted a research report of CBS, the Central Statistical Bureau in the Netherland. In 2005 there were some 250 Indian families living in Amstelveen, in 2015 there were 2.500, ten times more. Most of them work for Indian IT-companies in Amsterdam – Tata, Infosys, Wipro. Even the Japanes Canon company in Amstelveen has lots of Indian IT-specialists working nowadays. They play cricket, eat Indian food, have their Hindu festivals. Still, most of the expats in the Netherlands come from Gemany and the UK. The Germans work in education and government, the British in producer services. Their total number is now 57.000; two thirds are men; many of them are high educated and earn quite lot of money. Their growing numbers are striking. Half will stay no longer than five years at most, they all work on the South Axis (Zuidas) in Amsterdam, the majority in IT. The Asian community is growing fastest.

Another striking outcome: 70 per cent of the expats in the Netherlands live and work in only twenty municipalities. Most of these municipalities are in and around Amsterdam, along the dune coast, near Leiden, and along the Utrechtse Heuvelrug, near Utrecht. This is the rich northern Randstad area. The newspaper quoted experts who told the journalist that there are 1,25 billion Indians, IT is one of the most popular studies in India, there is a lack of IT-specialists in the Netherlands, so the Dutch Silicon Valley needs them. Amstelveen knows it, and tries to attract them. Amsterdam itself has become too hot now, even for expats. Three per cent of the Amstelveen population now is of Indian birth. Unlike the migrants from Syria and Africa they do not have to live in asylumseeker centers somewhere in the woods,in the Dutch periphery. They can live where they want, so they all prefer concentrated, densily built urban areas in the western part of the country, in their own communities. Except Amsterdam.