History and Abolition of the 'Western' and 'Non-Western' Immigrant Categories in Dutch Statistics AI-pedia

Between 1999 and 2022, the official statistical agency of the Netherlands, Statistics Netherlands (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, or CBS), classified the Dutch population using a formal division between persons of "Western" (westerse) and "non-Western" (niet-westerse) origin. This framework was layered on top of the established legal-demographic category of the allochtoon, a term denoting any resident who had at least one parent born outside the Netherlands. While designed as an objective, socioeconomic metric to guide government integration policy (integratiebeleid), the binary system categorised countries according to perceived socioeconomic, geographic, and cultural distance from the native Dutch population.

The system produced complex classifications that often contradicted pure geography. For example, immigrants from Indonesia and Japan were formally categorised as "Western," whereas immigrants from Turkey, Suriname, the Dutch Caribbean, and South Korea were categorised as "non-Western." For over two decades, this classification structured Dutch social research, welfare allocations, public safety reporting, and parliamentary debate. However, it also attracted sustained criticism from social scientists, international human rights monitors, and minority groups, who argued that it operated as an institutionalised racial, cultural, and religious proxy that stigmatised non-white citizens and permanently separated them from the native Dutch (autochtonen).

In February 2022, following years of public debate and a comprehensive review by the Scientific Council for Government Policy (Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid, or WRR), CBS and the WRR formally abolished the "Western" and "non-Western" classifications. The Dutch state replaced the model with a descriptive system based directly on the actual country of birth of an individual and their parents, alongside broad continental groupings (Europe versus outside Europe). The history of this classification illustrates how demographic tools can reflect and influence political priorities, racial conceptions, and national identity.

Historical Background: Post-War Demographics and Terminology

The Post-War Baseline and Nationality Principles

In 1950, Dutch society was demographically homogeneous compared to the late twentieth century. Dutch citizenship, legal nationality, and ethnic Dutch descent were closely aligned in practice. The population was organised around "pillarisation" (verzuiling), a social structure in which Protestant, Catholic, socialist, and liberal communities maintained their own schools, trade unions, newspapers, hospitals, and political parties. International migration was modest and consisted primarily of movements between the Netherlands and neighbouring European nations such as Belgium and Germany, alongside an established Jewish community that had been decimated during the Holocaust.

Dutch nationality law was founded primarily on the legal principle of jus sanguinis ("right of blood"), meaning Dutch citizenship was passed down from parents to children rather than acquired automatically through birth on Dutch soil (jus soli). As migration into the Netherlands expanded in subsequent decades, this framework meant that legal citizenship and ethnic heritage remained conceptually distinct within the Dutch administrative apparatus.

Decolonisation and Post-Colonial Migration

The demographic transformation of the Netherlands began with the collapse of the Dutch colonial empire following World War II. When Indonesia gained independence in 1949 after an armed revolution, hundreds of thousands of people relocated to the Netherlands over a fifteen-year period. This population included approximately 300,000 Indo-Europeans (Indische Nederlanders, people of mixed Dutch and Indonesian heritage), Dutch colonial administrators, and approximately 12,500 Moluccan soldiers who had fought in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL) along with their families.

A second major colonial demographic shift occurred in the 1970s. Ahead of the independence of Suriname in 1975, nearly one-third of the Surinamese population migrated to the Netherlands, exercising their right to Dutch citizenship before it expired. Emigration from the Caribbean islands of the Netherlands Antilles (such as Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire) also increased as economic conditions shifted, bringing Dutch subjects from the Caribbean into European Dutch cities.

Labour Recruitment and Family Reunification

Simultaneously, the rapid industrial expansion of the 1960s created severe labour shortages in the Dutch manufacturing, shipbuilding, and agricultural sectors. The Dutch government entered into formal bilateral recruitment agreements with Mediterranean countries: Italy (1960), Spain (1961), Portugal (1963), Turkey (1964), Greece (1966), and Morocco (1969). These workers were officially designated as "guest workers" (gastarbeiders), reflecting the official state assumption that their stay was temporary and that they would return to their countries of origin once industrial labour needs declined.

The economic shocks of the 1970s, including the 1973 oil crisis, ended recruitment, but large numbers of guest workers did not return home. Instead, workers increasingly brought their spouses and children to the Netherlands under family reunification policies. By the late 1980s, these communities had established deep roots in Dutch urban centres such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht, transitioning the Netherlands into an immigration country despite official political reluctance to acknowledge the change.

The Coining of 'Allochtoon' and 'Autochtoon'

As the foreign-origin population grew, Dutch policy makers sought terminology that avoided pejorative associations. In 1971, sociologist Hilda Verwey-Jonker authored a report for the Ministry of Culture, Recreation, and Social Work (CRM) titled Allochtonen in Nederland ("Allochthones in the Netherlands"). She introduced the Greek terms allochtoon (literally "from another soil", derived from allos [other] and chthōn [earth/soil]) and its antonym autochtoon ("from this soil", derived from autos [self/same] and chthōn).

Verwey-Jonker intended allochtoon as an objective, neutral, and polite alternative to existing everyday labels such as "foreigner" (buitenlander) or "guest worker" (gastarbeider). She argued that the word was free of social stigma because it had no prior history in colloquial Dutch; in science, it had previously been used only in geology and botany to refer to minerals or plants that originated elsewhere. In 1989, Statistics Netherlands formally adopted the word for statistical use, establishing an exact operational definition: an allochtoon was any individual living in the Netherlands who had at least one parent born outside the country.

The 1999 Division: Western and Non-Western Categories

The Political and Administrative Context of 1999

Throughout the 1990s, political debate in the Netherlands shifted away from the multicultural model that had characterised 1980s policy (which funded minority cultural organisations and mother-tongue education) toward an emphasis on civic integration, Dutch language acquisition, and labour market participation. Prominent politicians, such as liberal leader Frits Bolkestein in 1991, argued that cultural differences could impede integration, and public discussions intensified around social security dependency and school performance among immigrant communities.

In 1999, the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations asked Statistics Netherlands to refine its demographic classifications. The government wanted a statistical mechanism to identify which immigrant populations were adapting economically and educationally at rates similar to native Dutch citizens, and which populations faced persistent structural disadvantages. In response, CBS introduced a binary division separating the allochtoon population into two distinct sub-groups: westerse allochtonen (Western immigrants) and niet-westerse allochtonen (non-Western immigrants).

The Mechanics of the Register-Based System

Unlike countries such as the United States or the United Kingdom, which rely primarily on self-reported racial or ethnic identities in decennial censuses, the Netherlands uses an administrative register system. The Dutch Municipal Personal Records Database (originally the Gemeentelijke Basisadministratie persoonsgegevens, or GBA, later reformed as the Basisregistratie Personen, or BRP) records the birth country, nationality, and parental data for every registered resident.

This automated registration allowed CBS to categorize individuals without asking them to self-identify. The basic classification operated through three rules:

1. Autochtoon: An individual whose parents were both born in the Netherlands, regardless of the individual's own country of birth.
2. First-generation allochtoon: An individual born abroad, with at least one parent born abroad.
3. Second-generation allochtoon: An individual born in the Netherlands, with at least one parent born abroad.

When an individual had one parent born in the Netherlands and one parent born abroad, the country of origin was assigned based on the country of the parent born abroad. If both parents were born abroad in two different countries, the country of origin was defined as the mother's country of birth.

The Geographical and Categorical Framework

Once origin was established by parental birth country, CBS applied the 1999 Western/non-Western division. The classification grouped countries into two distinct categories:

Classification	Regions and Countries Included	Key Exceptions and Special Assignments
Western (Westers)	All countries in Europe (excluding Turkey); all countries in North America; all countries in Oceania.	Indonesia: Placed in the Western category despite being in Southeast Asia. Japan: Placed in the Western category despite being in East Asia.
Non-Western (Niet-westers)	All countries in Africa; all countries in Latin America; all countries in Asia (excluding Indonesia and Japan).	Turkey: Placed in the non-Western category despite its European territory and Council of Europe membership. Suriname and Dutch Caribbean: Placed in the non-Western category despite centuries-long political ties to the Dutch Kingdom.

CBS officially maintained that the categories were socioeconomic and not geographical or cultural. The bureau argued that the grouping grouped populations whose socioeconomic, educational, and demographic performance closely mirrored the native Dutch population (the "Western" group) versus populations that showed significant statistical disparities in employment, welfare reliance, and educational attainment (the "non-Western" group). Within the non-Western category, CBS frequently created a sub-category known as the "four major groups" (de vier grote groepen): Turks, Moroccans, Surinamese, and Antilleans, who together formed the core target of early integration policies.

Analysis of Country Exceptions and Classifications

Indonesia: Post-Colonial Assimilation and Legal Precedent

Indonesia was the most historically rooted anomaly in the 1999 classification. Geographically located in Southeast Asia, Indonesia was categorized by CBS as Western. CBS justified this choice on demographic and socioeconomic grounds. The majority of individuals who migrated from Indonesia between 1945 and 1965 held Dutch citizenship or Dutch subject status.

Most migrants from Indonesia were Indo-Europeans (Indische Nederlanders) who had grown up in Dutch-speaking households, had attended colonial European schools, and carried European legal status during the colonial era. Moluccan soldiers and their families, while facing initial social friction and housing in segregated camps during the 1950s, were also state-linked migrants. Within one to two generations, the socioeconomic outcomes, marriage patterns, and income levels of the Indonesian-origin population were statistically indistinguishable from, or exceeded, those of ethnic Dutch citizens. Placing Indonesia in the non-Western category would have skewed integration indicators for other Asian populations that did not share this specific colonial background.

Japan: Expatriates, Commerce, and 19th-Century Law

Japan was classified as Western primarily due to the unique socioeconomic profile of the Japanese community living in the Netherlands. The Japanese population was largely concentrated in the Amsterdam and Amstelveen areas, consisting almost entirely of corporate executives, financial professionals, diplomats, and their dependents working for multinational enterprises such as Canon, Mitsubishi, and Sony.

Members of the Japanese community rarely relied on the Dutch social security system, had high average incomes, and typically remained in the country on temporary corporate assignments or enrolled their children in private international schools. Classifying Japan as non-Western would have distorted the targeted purpose of the non-Western category as a measure of domestic socioeconomic disadvantage.

This designation also matched an older legal precedent. In 1899, following the revision of unequal treaties between Western nations and Japan, the Kingdom of the Netherlands had formally amended colonial regulations in the Dutch East Indies to grant Japanese nationals legal equality with Europeans under colonial law (pre-dating the 1905 Russo-Japanese War). This historical convention laid a conceptual foundation for viewing Japan as legally and administratively parallel to European powers.

Turkey: The Boundary of Geography and Labour History

The placement of Turkey in the non-Western category was a point of recurring geographic and geopolitical contention. Geographically, a portion of Turkey is located in Eastern Thrace within the European continent. Politically, Turkey had been a member of the Council of Europe since 1949, a founding member of the OECD since 1961, and an associate member of the European Economic Community since 1963.

However, CBS placed Turkey in the non-Western category because the Turkish population in the Netherlands was composed overwhelmingly of former guest workers recruited from rural Anatolia during the 1960s and early 1970s, along with their families. When Dutch heavy industry contracted in the late 1970s and 1980s, these workers experienced disproportionate unemployment. Language barriers, low levels of formal education, and high rates of welfare dependency aligned the Turkish community's statistical profile with the socioeconomic target metrics of the integration policy. Consequently, CBS prioritized labour market indicators over Turkey's formal institutional relationships with Europe.

Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean: Colonial Ties versus Statistical Categorisation

The classification of Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean (Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Maarten, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba) as non-Western revealed direct contradictions within the framework. Unlike guest workers from the Mediterranean, migrants from Suriname and the Caribbean arrived in the Netherlands as Dutch citizens who had been educated within Dutch colonial school systems and who often spoke Dutch as a first or native language.

Suriname had been part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands until 1975, and the Caribbean islands remained within the Kingdom under the Charter for the Kingdom of the Netherlands (Statuut voor het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden). Despite their legal citizenship and language proficiency, Caribbean and Surinamese migrants were categorised as non-Western because their geographic origin lay in South America and the Caribbean, and because their average statistical rates of educational attainment, single-parent households, and employment participation diverged from the native Dutch average during the 1980s and 1990s. This created a scenario where Dutch subjects of Caribbean descent were classified as "non-Western," while a newly arrived migrant from rural Finland, Spain, or Poland was classified as "Western."

South Korea and Other High-Income Nations

South Korea highlighted the administrative limits and regional assumptions of the 1999 model. In 1999, South Korea was already an industrialised economy and a member of the OECD (having joined in 1996). South Korean migrants in the Netherlands were predominantly skilled professionals, researchers, corporate employees, and international students, displaying a socioeconomic profile very similar to that of the Japanese community.

Nonetheless, South Korea was placed in the non-Western category. Unlike Japan or Indonesia, CBS did not create an individual exemption for South Korea. Bureaucrats at the time applied a broad regional assignment rule: unless specifically exempted, all countries in Asia were coded as non-Western. Because the total number of South Korean residents in the Netherlands was small, CBS saw little statistical reason to introduce another exception, leaving South Korea categorized alongside developing economies for more than twenty years.

Critiques and Public Controversies

The Racial and Cultural Proxy Argument

From the mid-2000s onward, academic sociologists, political commentators, and anti-discrimination organisations increasingly criticised the Western/non-Western dichotomy as a thinly veiled proxy for race, skin colour, and religion. Critics pointed out that "Western" corresponded closely to white or European populations (with exceptions made for high-income or colonial-assimilated Asian groups), whereas "non-Western" functioned as an administrative euphemism for non-white, post-colonial, or Muslim minorities.

Sociologists such as Halleh Ghorashi and Sawitri Saharso argued that the classification naturalised cultural differences. By continuously aggregating disparate nationalities—such as highly educated Iranian political refugees, rural Moroccan agricultural workers, and Dutch-speaking Afro-Surinamese citizens—into a single "non-Western" collective, the statistical model implied an inherent cultural and economic distance separating these groups from the Dutch mainstream.

The Problem of the 'Second Generation'

One of the most structural criticisms of the framework was its application to people born and raised in the Netherlands. Under the CBS definition, any individual born on Dutch soil who had at least one parent born abroad was categorized as a "second-generation allochtoon" (tweede generatie allochtoon). If that parent was born in an African, Asian, Latin American, or Turkish territory, the Dutch-born child was designated as a "second-generation non-Western allochtoon."

This demographic rule created an inherited status. An individual could hold Dutch citizenship from birth, speak fluent Dutch as a native language, complete their entire schooling in the Netherlands, and never visit their parents' country of birth, yet remain permanently registered as "non-Western" in national data. Civil rights advocates pointed out that this system contradicted the principle of civic equality. It institutionalised a permanent division between "real" Dutch citizens (autochtonen) and conditional citizens (allochtonen), regardless of how many decades a family had resided in the country.

Institutional Usage and Criminality Statistics

The controversy deepened when the "non-Western" label was used in public debates about crime and security. Dutch law enforcement agencies, municipal governments, and CBS regularly published reports examining crime statistics broken down by migration background (often reported as allochtonencriminaliteit).

Right-wing populist parties, including the Pim Fortuyn List (LPF) in the early 2000s and later the Party for Freedom (PVV) led by Geert Wilders and Forum for Democracy (FvD) led by Thierry Baudet, used these statistical publications in their political campaigns. They argued that high rates of suspect registrations among "non-Western youth" demonstrated the failure of multiculturalism and justified tighter immigration restrictions, specifically from Muslim-majority countries. Sociologists countered that these statistical reports often failed to control for socioeconomic factors such as household income, urban density, and parental education levels. Critics maintained that by attributing crime trends to "non-Western" background rather than to poverty or educational attainment, state statistics reinforced structural discrimination and ethnic profiling in everyday policing.

International Scrutiny

International human rights bodies also questioned the Dutch statistical model. The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), a monitoring body of the Council of Europe, criticised the Dutch government's use of allochtoon and the Western/non-Western binary in several country reports. ECRI warned that dividing citizens based on parental origin stigmatised ethnic minority populations and contributed to structural discrimination in the labour and housing markets. The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) of the United Nations raised similar concerns, noting that the continued official use of these classifications entrenched social divisions rather than reducing them.

The Road to Abolition (2016–2022)

The 2016 WRR Intervention

The movement to abolish the terminology gained institutional momentum in November 2016, when the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) published a policy brief titled Wonen, werken en leven in de stad ("Living, Working, and Life in the City"). The WRR, which advises the Dutch cabinet and parliament on long-term policy strategies, argued that the words allochtoon and autochtoon were obsolete and counterproductive.

The WRR demonstrated that the demographic landscape of major Dutch cities had become too complex for a binary model. By 2016, a majority of children growing up in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague had a migration background, encompassing more than 170 distinct nationalities. Using a single label (allochtoon) to describe this population obscured crucial differences between international students, high-tech European expats, post-colonial citizens, and asylum seekers. The council recommended that the terms allochtoon and autochtoon be dropped from government policy and replaced by clear descriptive language, such as "resident with a migration background" (inwoner met een migratieachtergrond).

Following this report, major Dutch public institutions began abandoning the term. The Dutch public broadcasting organisation (NOS) announced in late 2016 that its newsrooms would discontinue the use of allochtoon and autochtoon in journalism, noting that the terms had acquired a derogatory tone in colloquial speech. Municipalities, including Amsterdam and Utrecht, also revised their policy documents.

The Persistence of 'Western' and 'Non-Western'

Although the umbrella term allochtoon was phased out from everyday political language between 2016 and 2018, CBS initially retained the underlying Western and non-Western divisions. The bureau simply renamed the categories: persoon met een westerse migratieachtergrond (person with a Western migration background) and persoon met een niet-westerse migratieachtergrond (person with a non-Western migration background).

This cosmetic change did not satisfy researchers, activists, or the WRR. Integration debates continued to rely on the non-Western metric, meaning that Dutch-born citizens with Turkish, Moroccan, Surinamese, or Antillean parents remained in a separate administrative category. Critics pointed out that a person whose parents came from Poland or Hungary was classified as "Western," even though Polish and Hungarian immigrants faced their own distinct language barriers, labour market exploitation, and social challenges in the Netherlands, while second-generation Dutch citizens of Surinamese descent remained "non-Western" despite their linguistic, legal, and cultural immersion in Dutch society.

The 2021 WRR Report and the 2022 Joint Decision

In 2021, the WRR published an extensive report titled Samenleven in verscheidenheid: Beleid voor de migratiesamenleving ("Living Together in Diversity: Policy for the Migration Society"). The report recommended a complete end to the "Western" and "non-Western" categories in Dutch governance and data collection. The WRR concluded that the division was inaccurate, promoted an "us-versus-them" mentality, and failed to reflect the real socioeconomic positions of different demographic groups.

Following these findings, Statistics Netherlands worked with the WRR and various ministries to develop a new classification methodology. On February 1, 2022, CBS and the WRR held a joint press conference announcing that the Western and non-Western categories were formally discontinued. CBS acknowledged that the classifications had lost their empirical utility and had caused unintended social exclusion.

The Current Statistical System (Post-2022)

Core Principles of the New Framework

The statistical framework introduced by CBS in February 2022 abandoned cultural and socioeconomic regional assumptions, replacing them with a purely geographic classification. The new system is built around three objective data points: where the individual was born, where their parents were born, and the specific country involved.

The terminology was revised to remove hyphenated identities and value judgments:

• Herkomst Nederland (Dutch origin): An individual who was born in the Netherlands and whose parents were both born in the Netherlands. This category directly replaced the old label autochtoon.
• Herkomst buiten Nederland (Origin outside the Netherlands): An individual who was either born abroad or has at least one parent born abroad. This replaced the term allochtoon or migratieachtergrond.

Generational and Continental Distinctions

CBS continues to track migration across generations to measure structural social mobility and long-term integration, but it does so without the "Western" and "non-Western" labels. Instead, the bureau breaks down the population as follows:

1. First generation (Geboren in het buitenland): An individual who was born outside the Netherlands.
2. Second generation (Geboren in Nederland): An individual who was born in the Netherlands, with at least one parent born abroad.

When presenting broader demographic summaries, CBS no longer groups data into Western and non-Western categories. Instead, it aggregates data by continent:

• Europe (excluding the Netherlands)
• Africa
• Asia
• North America
• South America and the Caribbean
• Oceania

For more general European comparisons, CBS sometimes uses a two-way regional breakdown: Europe (excluding the Netherlands) and Outside Europe. Crucially, this distinction is applied based purely on geographical borders. Turkey, for instance, is treated according to established international cartographic conventions (or reported separately as its own national origin), while Suriname is classified geographically under Latin America/Caribbean rather than grouped with arbitrary socioeconomic peers.

Rules for Determining Country of Origin

Under the post-2022 system, when an individual has ties to more than one country, CBS applies clear operational rules to determine their primary country of origin (herkomstland):

Situation	Rule for Determining Origin Country (Herkomstland)
Individual born abroad	The individual's own country of birth is assigned as their origin.
Individual born in the Netherlands, one parent born abroad	The country of birth of the parent who was born abroad is assigned.
Individual born in the Netherlands, both parents born abroad (in the same country)	The country of birth of both parents is assigned.
Individual born in the Netherlands, parents born in two different foreign countries	The mother's country of birth takes precedence and is assigned as the origin.
Individual born in the Netherlands, both parents born in the Netherlands	The origin is recorded simply as "Netherlands" (no foreign origin assigned).

Importantly, CBS introduced a demographic boundary: the statistical tracing of origin ends with the second generation. The children of two parents who were both born in the Netherlands are classified as having "Dutch origin" (herkomst Nederland), regardless of where their grandparents were born. This rule prevents the creation of a perpetual, multi-generational immigrant status under state statistics.

Political and Social Reception

Support and Civil Rights Reactions

The abolition of the Western/non-Western binary was widely supported by academic researchers, civil rights organisations, and left-of-centre and progressive political parties, such as GroenLinks (GreenLeft), D66 (Democrats 66), and BIJ1. These groups celebrated the reform as an overdue acknowledgment that second- and third-generation Dutch citizens are full members of Dutch society rather than perpetual outsiders.

Sociologists noted that the change aligned Dutch statistics with European best practices and allowed for more accurate, targeted empirical research. Researchers pointed out that treating groups like Polish labour migrants, Syrian refugees, and Surinamese-Dutch families as distinct populations with specific geographical backgrounds produces clearer public policy insights than combining them into artificial Western and non-Western categories.

Opposition and Political Pushback

The decision was criticised by right-wing populist, nationalist, and conservative political parties, including the Party for Freedom (PVV), Forum for Democracy (FvD), and JA21. Critics in these parties described the abolition as an exercise in "political correctness" and accused the government and CBS of trying to obscure long-standing problems regarding integration, Islamic cultural friction, welfare dependency, and migrant-related crime.

These critics argued that the "non-Western" category had been a practical way to track difficulties associated with immigration from non-European, non-secular societies. Some politicians declared that they would continue to use the term allochtoon in parliamentary debates and public campaigns, asserting that changing administrative labels does not change underlying socioeconomic realities. Despite this political pushback, government agencies, universities, research institutes, and official policy documents have largely phased out the old terminology in line with the CBS directives.

See also

• Demographics of the Netherlands
• Allochtoon
• Statistics Netherlands
• Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid
• Indische Nederlanders
• Moluccan Dutch
• Immigration to Europe
• Dutch nationality law