Long-term housing challenges

After their arrival, migrant workers are faced with often overheated housing markets. With little knowledge of the local context and limited economic resources, they depend heavily on their own network or the generally expensive private rental sector for their initial accommodation.

Shared and informal housing

Based on a quantitative analysis of Dutch register data, this paper identifies patterns in tenure registrations of EU migrant workers in the Netherlands, over time. The findings of this study underline how housing inequalities are a widespread phenomenon. While migrant workers have a crucial function in today’s economy, their housing trajectories are fragmented and, in particular, lower-income, older and single migrants have limited access stable and secure housing. These challenges are not transitionary and do not disappear over time. However, there is also a group of highly skilled migrant workers on a higher income who are able to achieve rapid access to homeownership and who will hardly make use of shared and informal housing. These differences are not only along the lines of countries of origin, but reflect broader societal divides. The impact of these divides extends beyond the housing domain, as precarity on the housing market can overlap and influence other aspects of daily life.

Not just a problem of employment agencies

The policy ramifications of these findings are manifold. At the moment, Dutch policymakers are concerned with addressing the detrimental housing conditions of migrant workers. They are specifically targeting employment agencies as key actors in the provision of sub-standard housing. It appears, however, that housing insecurity is a much broader phenomenon and is related to wider inequalities in society. In order to address housing issues, a comprehensive vision and approach is thus needed that not only targets employers, but also addresses housing accessibility and migrant labour market conditions in general.