Introduction

It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to respond to the compelling contribution of Heinz Fassmann and Ursula Reeger. Their work demonstrates their ability to reduce the complexity of international systems in a very elegant way. Their conceptual model of a migration cycle offers an important heuristic device for analysing migration history. To further illustrate its applicability, I will apply it to my country, the Netherlands. However, this sort of application and a closer look at current migration flows to ‘old’ immigration countries will necessarily provoke one major question. This question is related to the emphasis given in their chapter to historical context and its effects on emigration and immigration. This includes, for example, a colonial past or certain labour recruitment policies in the 1950s and 1960s. The question is whether such a historical, ‘path-dependent’ approach offers an adequate explanation for contemporary, rather unexpected labour migration flows from Central European Countries (CEE) to Western Europe. The European Union enlargements of 2004 and 2007 have generated substantial labour migration from CEE through the successive lifting of restrictions to the majority of labour markets from the old EU member states. Hundreds of thousands of migrants from Poland, Romania and Bulgaria went to Western European countries as a consequence (Black, Engbersen, Okólski & Panţîru 2010). This issue, which is related to labour migration, does not do justice to the full complexity of the analysis by Fassman and Reeger. However, I think it is relevant to analyse whether the nature of contemporary labour migration differs from labour migration flows in the past.

Path dependency versus new pathways of migration

For decades, the Netherlands was – like Germany and Austria – a ‘reluctant country of immigration’ (Cornelius, Tsuda, Martin & Hollifield 2004; Muus 2004). Although the Netherlands has had a positive immigration surplus since the early 1960s, successive governments have continued to officially deny that the Netherlands was a country of immigration. It was not until 1998 that the Dutch government officially acknowledged the fact that the Netherlands had become an immigration country. The different stages in a ‘migration cycle’, as proposed by Fassmann and Reeger, can be applied to the Netherlands (Engbersen, Van der Leun & De Boom 2007).

Preliminary phase

After World War II, the Netherlands was a country of emigration. Many Dutch citizens emigrated to immigration countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, Brazil and South Africa. Between 1946 and 1969, nearly 500,000 Dutch citizens left the Netherlands.