This essay combines the history of labour migration to the Netherlands with the history of social security arrangements, focussing on old age pensions and unemployment benefits. Mutual insurances in these two areas had existed long before, but a political discussion arose only in the first decades of the twentieth century. These led to fledgling arrangements for old age pensions and – through trade unions – for unemployment relief. After 1945, the Dutch welfare state was built. A basic old age pension (AOW) is financed on a pay-as-you-go basis from taxes. To fully qualify one has to have lived in the Netherlands for 50 years before the age of retirement. On top of this, most retired former wage earners and their spouses receive an additional pension, which is funded through premiums deducted from their pay over the working years. This outcome was influenced by political compromises, necessary to get a political majority to establish the AOW. Labour immigration played no role in the considerations. The outcome, however, was not favourable to labour immigrants, who arrive later in their life and working career, and will not build up full pensions. Unemployment relief (WW, 1949) was based on the amount of days worked in the period before unemployment set in. From 1963 the Social assistance Act (bijstand) guaranteed basic benefits for those who had no income and did not qualify for any of the other welfare schemes. That includes unemployed after their WW-benefits run out. Earlier groups of guestworkers had returned home when they could no longer find paid jobs in the Netherlands. The last groups to arrive, Moroccans and Turks, often chose to have their families come over to the Netherlands. Especially the first generation of these labour immigrants remain overrepresented in the bijstand. There are no indications that the Dutch welfare state specifically drew labour migrants. They came because work was offered and paid better than jobs at home. But once here, the choice of guestworkers to remain and bring their families over was influenced by welfare state arrangements and the way they were adapted.
Return migration is a crucial yet often overlooked dimension of the migratory experience. Recognizing return paths challenges the notion of migration as a unilinear, one-directional process, instead revealing the circular and continuous nature of human mobility. Even in the era of transatlantic migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, many passengers crossed the Atlantic multiple times. Returning to Europe was often not the conclusion of a journey but simply another stage in an ongoing cycle of movements. Gender shaped the kinds of careers and opportunities available to mobile people. Even if women and men moved within distinct socio-economic power structures, evidence on gender-specific data on transatlantic returnees before World War I remains scarce.
This article examines the role of Belgian frontier workers in labor conflicts in the Netherlands during the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on contemporary press reports, the study analyzes key cases, such as the Sphinx ceramics factory in Maastricht, the Etna factory in Breda, and the Clitex textile plant in Clinge. Belgian frontier workers frequently initiated or sustained strikes, often driven by grievances linked to their cross-border status, including unequal child benefits and exchange rate losses. Their activism exposed national differences in industrial relations, but there are no indications of a transnational transfer of protest culture.
This article examines the local implementation of immigration regulation in Leiden between 1855 and 1925, with special attention to gender differences in registration, labour market position, and expulsion practices. While historical research has largely focused on national migration policy, this study shows that local administrative routines and labour demand strongly shaped the experiences of migrants. Women were significantly underregistered in the decades after the 1849 Alien Law, as authorities prioritised men as household heads. After 1918, registration procedures became more uniform, yet female migrants—particularly unmarried German domestic servants—remained closely monitored. Their migration profile was tied to the high demand for domestic labour, partly because local women increasingly preferred factory work. Although men were more often expelled overall, records reveal that after 1918 German female servants were expelled more frequently than before and were subject to stricter surveillance. The Leiden case supports the argument that local authorities primarily sought to control migrants’ mobility, with moral oversight more strongly directed at women.
Migration collections, serial connections and dynamic source criticism In this article, we focus on broadening historical migration research in the Netherlands by adding the emigration perspective. We do this on the basis of an analysis of our projects EMIGRATION 1945-1967 and MIGRANT, and the collaboration we have had with Marlou Schrover at various times. Over the course of our approximately 25-year collaboration, the digital and computational aspects of historical research have become increasingly important, as has the complexity of source criticism and methodology. Thus far, it has proven difficult to bring together the worlds of historical (migration) research and digital or computational analysis, if only because few professional journals have been designed for this purpose. Building on the MIGRANT project, initiated in 2010, we will systematically analyze the methodological issues, the choices we have made, and their consequences. We will also consider the extent to which historical emigration and immigration research, as well as analogue and digital expertise, have been integrated. Finally, we will consider how this convergence could be further facilitated.
The ability to learn about other places and cultures through a wide range of media is an important feature of the internet age, but the role of virtual mobility in the past is a largely neglected topic. In this paper I argue that mid-twentieth century pen pal correspondence provided a window on the wider world that would otherwise have been unavailable, and that virtual mobility should be seen as an integral part of the history of migration and mobility. I use a set of pen pal letters written between 1946 and 2012 to assess what each correspondent learned from their letters and how this form of virtual mobility might have expanded their world views.
Studies of migration have expanded in recent decades, deepening the inevitable interaction of their analysis. This essay focuses on the issue of scale in the interpretation of migration history, where scale is geographic, temporal, and topical. The analysis compares the work of two outstanding migration historians with each other and with a wider field of migration scholars, asking: How does the interpretation and validity of an analysis in migration vary with the scale of its structure? What are the conclusions on patterns of migrant behavior and migrant reception at each scale? Marlou Schrover and Leo Lucassen have each published at multiple scales, especially on migration within the Netherlands and Europe, but have also published at community, national, continental, and global scopes. In community and national studies, they are able to rely on well-organized empirical data. Is their global analysis carried out as an extension of national analysis, or are there distinctive data, hypotheses, or conclusions at global or extra-European levels? This review suggests that, for these scholars, studies at extra-European and global scales combine national-level approaches with global-level innovations, so that the full array of migration studies shows changing patterns of migration at varying scales of aggregation. Thus, the overall discipline of migration studies may be evolving toward developing interpretations that vary at different scales.
Despite its long history as a migration society, the Netherlands increasingly frames migration as an unprecedented crisis and the central problem of contemporary politics. This article conceptualizes this paradox as a migration obsession: a persistent and emotionally charged fixation on migration that is largely immune to historical knowledge and empirical evidence. Rather than reflecting migration dynamics themselves, this obsession expresses deeper anxieties about globalization, social change, and the perceived erosion of national control. The article identifies several mechanisms driving this obsession: the symbolic role of migration as shorthand for globalization; a shift from consensus-oriented consociational politics to confrontational populism; media logics that privilege dramatization and crisis framing; structural inequalities that marginalize migrant voices; and declining trust in institutions, expertise, and democratic governance. Migration thus functions as a revelatory case, exposing not a crisis of migration but a broader struggle within Dutch society to cope with complexity and political uncertainty.
This special issue of TSEG - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History is dedicated to Marlou Schrover and Leo Lucassen, who will both retire in 2026. The volume is presented to them on the occasion of their farewell symposium, held in Leiden on March 27, 2026. With this special issue, colleagues from the Netherlands and abroad honor two scholars whose work has been foundational to the development of migration history as a vibrant, analytically rigorous, and socially engaged field of research.
In the late Middle Ages, the privilege of ‘pre-loading’ (recht van voorlading en aflegging) had developed in several towns of the Low Countries. In the sixteenth century Amsterdam followed, despite opposition from other cities in Holland. This privilege gave members of Amsterdam’s skipper’s guilds the first right to take cargoes, bypassing not only the interests of skippers from outside Amsterdam, but also the preferences of merchants, the owners of the cargo. The development of Amsterdam’s right of pre-loading and its reactions provide new insights in two debates in the field of the NIE. It nuances Sheilagh Ogilvie’s thesis that the power of guilds declined in times of economic growth. It also challenges Oscar Gelderblom’s thesis that cities adapted their institutions to the wishes of merchants: cities maintained their right of pre-loading against the wishes of merchants. Finally this article shows how institutional change played a role in intercity rivalry.
