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IMMIGRANT CITIES
Rotterdam
Ports have always been places of arrival. Built on trade with the world, port cities attract people from all parts of the globe. The communities that take root in them are more cosmopolitan and outward-looking than those of inland towns.
The Immigrant Times has launched a new series, Immigrant Cities, that examines how immigration has shaped some of the world's major cities: their neighbourhoods, cultures, conflicts, and characters. We begin with Liverpool and Rotterdam, followed by Marseille and New Orleans and others.
Rotterdam is Europe's largest port and one of its most diverse cities. Its population of around 650,000 includes some 180 nationalities. Ahmed Aboutaleb, Rotterdam’s Mayor from 2009 to 2024, was born in Morocco and arrived in the city at 15. In 2021, he was awarded the World Mayor Prize. Turkish guest workers arrived in Rotterdam in the 1960s. In 2025, Rotterdam opened the Fenix Museum, an institution entirely dedicated to migration.
Introduction
April 2026: Rotterdam's motto is Sterker door strijd — Stronger through struggle. It was adopted after the German bombing of May 1940 that destroyed the entire city centre in fifteen minutes, but it might equally describe the city's relationship with immigration across five centuries. Rotterdam has always been a place where people arrived, stayed, and built something.
Today, Rotterdam is Europe's largest port and one of its most diverse cities. Its population of around 650,000 includes some 180 nationalities. More than half of all residents have a first- or second-generation background, with 57 per cent of children under 15 belonging to minority groups (2022 data). The largest communities are Turkish, Moroccan, Surinamese, Antillean, Cape Verdean, and increasingly Eastern European and sub-Saharan African, a demographic profile that reflects not one immigration story but is the result of centuries of trade, colonialism, labour recruitment, and refugee movements.
Rotterdam gave the world one of the great scholars of religious tolerance, and also the politician whose assassination launched a decade of ferocious anti-immigration politics. It was led by a Moroccan-born Muslim as its mayor for 15 years and, before that, by a populist movement that produced the most disruptive movement in modern Dutch history.
Rotterdam’s Golden Age and its immigrants
(1580–1800)
Rotterdam in the 16th century was a modest trading town, considerably less important than Amsterdam or Antwerp. What transformed it was a combination of geography, politics, and catastrophe elsewhere. When Antwerp fell to Spanish forces in 1585, a large wave of Flemish Protestant merchants, skilled craftsmen, and textile workers fled northward into the Dutch Republic. Rotterdam was among the cities that actively recruited them, offering free citizenship, tax exemptions, and subsidised rents to skilled refugees who would settle and work there. One of the most consequential arrivals was the Flemish merchant Johan van der Veeken, who co-established Rotterdam's first commodity exchange and became a joint founder of the Rotterdam chamber of the Dutch East India Company (VOC).
The Dutch Golden Age, which ran roughly from the establishment of the Dutch Republic in the late 16th century to the catastrophic Rampjaar (Disaster Year) of 1672 and beyond, transformed Rotterdam into a genuinely cosmopolitan port. The Dutch East India Company, of which Rotterdam was one of six chambers, and the Dutch West India Company (WIC), of which it was one of five, drew merchants, sailors, and workers from across Europe and further afield.
Scottish merchants formed a significant trading community, exchanging salted salmon, hides, and coal for luxury goods. German and Scandinavian traders passed through. English dissenters found refuge in a city whose Calvinist tolerance extended further than most.
The largest single refugee wave of the era came after 1685, when Louis XIV of France revoked the Edict of Nantes, stripping French Protestants, the Huguenots, of their religious freedoms and forcing the emigration of hundreds of thousands. Rotterdam, along with other Dutch cities, actively courted these refugees, most of them traders, skilled craftsmen, and professionals.
By 1705, an estimated three to five per cent of Rotterdam's population was of French Huguenot origin. The city offered them free citizenship and some institutional support. They integrated relatively quickly, intermarrying with the Dutch population within a generation or two, though their French surnames can still occasionally be traced in Dutch families today.
However, there was a darker side to Rotterdam's Golden Age cosmopolitanism. The city was deeply involved in the transatlantic slave trade; Rotterdam merchants were among the pioneers of the Dutch slave trade. The Dutch East India Company was also implicated in the Asian slave trade, supplying enslaved people for domestic labour across the Dutch colonial empire.
Rotterdam has, in recent decades, issued a formal apology for this history, acknowledging that the city's prosperity was substantially built on the exploitation of enslaved Africans and Asians. This is not, strictly speaking, an immigration story; the enslaved were not willing arrivals, but it established the routes and the commercial relationships through which later waves of colonial migration would flow.
It is also worth noting the Jewish community that settled in Rotterdam during this period. Sephardic Jews, expelled from Spain and Portugal during the Inquisition, had been among the earliest arrivals in the Dutch Republic, drawn by its relative tolerance. Rotterdam's Jewish community was smaller than Amsterdam's but established and, by the standards of the age, treated with reasonable acceptance, though exclusion from the guilds remained a persistent barrier.
Rotterdam’s booming port attracts hundreds of thousands of migrants
(1850 – 1945)
The completion of the Nieuwe Waterweg, a new canal connecting Rotterdam directly to the North Sea, in 1872 transformed the city's fortunes and its size. Within a generation, Rotterdam had become one of the world's busiest ports, handling much of the industrial traffic flowing along the Rhine into the heart of Western Europe.
The population exploded: from around 120,000 before 1870 to over 330,000 by 1900 and nearly 620,000 by 1939. The growth was fuelled primarily by migration from the Dutch countryside and the southern Netherlands, rather than by international migration. Rotterdam in this period became, above all, a working-class city: a city of dockers, shipyard workers, factory hands, and the people who fed, clothed, and housed them.
International immigration in this period was more modest than in the Golden Age, though not absent. The German community, which had been present since at least the 19th century, was large enough to be significant, and during the First World War, in which the Netherlands remained neutral, thousands of Belgian refugees flooded across the border, with Rotterdam absorbing a substantial share.
The interwar years brought German Jewish refugees fleeing the rise of National Socialism: by 1939, an estimated 24,000 to 34,000 Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria had entered the Netherlands, many settling in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. The Dutch government's response was ambivalent at best, and when the German occupation began in 1940, those refugees were among the most vulnerable.
The first Cape Verdean sailors also began arriving in Rotterdam in this period, signing on with Dutch shipping companies whose routes took them through the islands. They were initially a small community, but would grow into one of Rotterdam's most distinctive immigrant stories.
Then came 14 May 1940. In fifteen minutes of German bombing, the entire historic centre of Rotterdam was destroyed. At least 800 to 900 people were killed, over 25,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed, and 85,000 residents were left homeless. The Netherlands surrendered the following day. It was, as one Dutch historian wrote, not just a physical catastrophe but a psychological one, the destruction of a city's memory, its architecture, and its society.
The occupation lasted until May 1945. For Rotterdam's Jewish community, it was devastating. The pattern of persecution that swept the Netherlands saw approximately 75 per cent of Dutch Jews murdered in the Holocaust, one of the highest proportions in Western Europe, a fact that still weighs on Dutch national consciousness. Rotterdam's Jewish community was reduced from several thousand to a fragment.
The city that emerged from the ruins in 1945 was rebuilt almost entirely from scratch, in a modernist style that gave it a distinctive skyline, all steel, glass, and concrete, which sets it apart from every other Dutch city. But rebuilding required labour on a massive scale, and that requirement would shortly transform the city's demographic character more profoundly than anything since the Golden Age.
Colonial immigrants and guest workers arrive after World War II
(1945 – 2000)
The second half of the 20th century has two interlocking threads: the end of the Dutch colonial empire, and the recruitment of labour from the Mediterranean and beyond.
The colonial legacy: Indonesia, the Moluccans, and Suriname
When Indonesia declared independence in 1945, the Dutch government did not accept it. A colonial war, euphemistically described at the time as ‘police actions’, lasted until 1949, when American pressure forced the Netherlands to recognise Indonesian sovereignty. The consequences for Rotterdam were immediate and long-lasting.
In the years that followed, approximately 300,000 people of Dutch colonial background left Indonesia for the Netherlands. Most of them, civil servants, professionals, and mixed-heritage families who had attended Dutch schools and spoken Dutch as their primary language, integrated into Dutch society without great difficulty. The comparison sometimes made is with the French ‘pieds-noirs’ who left Algeria after 1962: both groups were colonial settlers returning to a mother country many had never visited, but the Dutch-Indonesian community, with its Dutch education and Dutch passports, found the transition somewhat smoother.
The Moluccan story was much more painful. The Moluccan Islands, in what is now eastern Indonesia, had long supplied soldiers to the Dutch colonial army (the KNIL). These men, mostly Christian in a predominantly Muslim country, had fought against the Japanese and then against Indonesian nationalist forces. When sovereignty was transferred in 1949, they found themselves in an impossible position, regarded as traitors by the new Indonesian government and unwelcome guests by the Dutch.
Some 12,500 Moluccan soldiers and their families were transported to the Netherlands in 1951, on what was officially described as a temporary arrangement. They were housed in former wartime camps, in some cases, camps that had held concentration camp survivors, and discharged from the army without ceremony. For years, they were denied full citizenship and barred from many forms of employment.
The Dutch government's assumption that the Moluccans would eventually return to an independent Moluccan republic proved entirely wrong. The Republic of the South Moluccas, proclaimed in 1950, was crushed by the Indonesian military within months. The Moluccans were stranded. As decades passed and the promised return never came, frustration in the community, particularly among the younger generation born in the Netherlands, turned to radicalisation.
In the 1970s, a series of dramatic and violent incidents followed: the hijacking of a train near the village of Wijster in 1975, a simultaneous hostage-taking at the Indonesian consulate, another train hijacking in 1977 at De Punt, and a school siege at Bovensmilde the same year. The Dutch special forces stormed both in 1977, killing six of the hijackers. The episodes were traumatic for Dutch society and deeply damaging to the Moluccan community's relationship with its host country, yet they also forced a public reckoning with how the Netherlands had treated people it had, in effect, abandoned.
The Moluccan community in the Netherlands today numbers somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000, dispersed across the country in purpose-built neighbourhoods. Integration has been slow and complicated by a history of grievance, but the third generation largely identifies as Dutch-Moluccan rather than as exiles awaiting return.
Suriname, the former Dutch colony on the northern coast of South America, provided the other major colonial migration. Surinamese people had Dutch citizenship, spoke Dutch, and had been educated in a Dutch curriculum. Many began arriving in the Netherlands in the 1960s, but the largest wave came in anticipation of, and following, independence in 1975. Rather than risk an uncertain future in an independent Suriname, many chose to exercise their right to Dutch nationality while they still could. Rotterdam received a substantial share of the Surinamese arrivals, as well as migrants from the Dutch Antilles in the Caribbean. The Surinamese community, with its greater Dutch cultural fluency, generally integrated more quickly than the Turkish or Moroccan guest workers, and by the early 21st century, a Surinamese middle class had established itself across the city.
The guest workers
While the colonial migrations were unfolding, Rotterdam was simultaneously engaged in a very different kind of recruitment. The post-war reconstruction of the port and the city, and the booming shipping and industrial economy of the 1950s and 1960s, created an insatiable demand for unskilled labour. The Dutch government signed bilateral agreements with Mediterranean countries, first Italy and Spain, then Turkey and Morocco, to bring in workers on temporary contracts. The assumption, shared by government, employers, and in many cases the workers themselves, was that this was a temporary arrangement: men would come, earn money, and return home.
Rotterdam's businesses recruited predominantly from Turkey, while Amsterdam's preferred Morocco, a distinction that persists in the demographic profiles of the two cities to this day, with Rotterdam having proportionally more Turks and Amsterdam more Moroccans. Turkish and Moroccan workers settled in the older working-class neighbourhoods around the port, including Delfshaven and Feijenoord.
The oil crisis of 1973 ended formal recruitment, but by then the workers were already there, and the legal and moral difficulty of expelling people who had built their lives in Rotterdam was obvious. The families came, wives, children, parents, through family reunification. The ‘temporary’ guest workers became permanent residents and, in time, Dutch citizens.
The integration of these communities has been the central social challenge of Rotterdam's modern history. Turkish and Moroccan women, in particular, faced significant barriers to labour market participation. In the early 2000s, roughly half of Turkish and Moroccan women aged 25-34 in Rotterdam were not active in the labour market, compared to fewer than 1 in 10 among native-born Dutch women. Educational gaps between immigrant communities and the native Dutch population remained persistent, though subsequent generations have narrowed them substantially. Crime rates among Moroccan and Antillean youth in particular remained a source of political tension throughout the period.
The Cape Verdeans
One of Rotterdam's most distinctive and least well-known internationally immigrant communities is the Cape Verdean community. Cape Verde, a group of islands 500 kilometres off the West African coast and a former Portuguese colony, has always been a nation of emigrants: today, more Cape Verdeans live outside the islands than within them. The connection with Rotterdam began with sailors signing on with Dutch shipping companies in the 1950s and accelerated through the 1960s. Word spread back to the islands that Rotterdam was a good place to moor, and young Cape Verdean men arrived in increasing numbers to work in the port. They concentrated in the Delfshaven district, and their families followed in the 1970s.
The Cape Verdean community in Rotterdam today numbers between 20,000 and 30,000, making it one of the three largest Cape Verdean diaspora communities in the world. What makes it remarkable is its cultural vitality. In 1965, Morabeza Records, the world’s first Cape Verdean record label, was founded in Rotterdam. It became a vehicle not only for music but for anti-colonial politics, promoting Cape Verdean cultural identity at precisely the moment when the independence struggle against Portugal was gathering force.
Cape Verde became independent in 1975, and the Rotterdam community had played a small but genuine part in making it happen. No other migrant community in the Netherlands has written as many songs about the city it settled in as the Cape Verdeans.
Pim Fortuyn and the political rupture
Rotterdam in the late 1990s was a city under pressure. Deindustrialisation had hollowed out the port's labour force. Unemployment in immigrant neighbourhoods was high. The social housing estates of the South Bank, built in the 1960s and 1970s to house the growing population, had become concentrations of poverty. And within this context, a flamboyant, openly gay, former sociology professor named Pim Fortuyn had identified immigration and Islam as the central issues of Dutch politics.
Fortuyn was not a simple figure. He had been a Labour Party member in his youth and retained some social democratic instincts on welfare and public services. But by the late 1990s, he had concluded that the Netherlands' tolerance of mass immigration and its reluctance to demand integration had created a cultural crisis.
He described Islam as a ‘backward culture’. He called for a drastic curtailment of immigration. Fortuyn was not racist in any conventional sense; he was happy to point out his own relationships with Moroccan men, but he was uncompromising in his insistence that immigrants must adopt Dutch values or leave.
In March 2002, his newly formed party (Pim Fortuyn List) won 35 per cent of the vote in Rotterdam's municipal elections, a result that astonished the Dutch political establishment. Nine days before the national elections, on 6 May 2002, Fortuyn was shot dead in a car park outside a radio studio in Hilversum by an animal rights activist. His party won 26 seats in the subsequent national election.
The murder, the first political assassination in the Netherlands since William the Silent in 1584, was a national trauma, and its political consequences proved lasting. Immigration had moved permanently to the centre of Dutch politics. Fortuyn's successors, most notably Geert Wilders, who would go on to win the largest share of the vote in the 2023 national elections, would build entire careers on the foundations he laid.
Immigration and politics in the 21st century
(2000 to the present)
The opening of the European Union's labour market to Polish and other Eastern European workers in 2004 brought a new wave of immigration to Rotterdam, as to the rest of the Netherlands. Polish workers in particular arrived in large numbers, concentrated in the lower-paid sectors of logistics, construction, and food processing, exactly the industries that had been built around the port.
The integration of Eastern European migrants proved easier in some respects than that of earlier waves, but brought new challenges around housing conditions, non-registration, and irregular work arrangements. Rotterdam's policy response was among the most contested in the Netherlands, with the city at various points attempting to restrict the settlement of low-income migrants in certain neighbourhoods, a policy that raised questions about legality and basic rights.
The Syrian refugee crisis of 2015 brought the largest single influx of asylum seekers to the Netherlands since the Second World War. Rotterdam received several thousand Syrian refugees as part of a national dispersal policy. The initial response was broadly humane, though the scale of the arrivals tested the capacity of reception centres and social services.
Syrian refugees, many of them well educated and with professional backgrounds, began the slow process of integration; Dutch-language acquisition proved the single most critical factor in their prospects. A decade on, the outcomes have been mixed; some have built stable lives, others remain in a protracted legal and economic limbo.
Ukrainian refugees from 2022 onwards represent the most recent major wave. Rotterdam, like most Dutch cities, received Ukrainians under the Temporary Protection Directive, which allowed for faster processing than standard asylum procedures. As with the Syrian community, the long-term picture remains uncertain; many Ukrainians have expressed a strong wish to return once the war ends, and the proportion who will stay permanently is impossible to predict. What is clear is that the Ukrainian arrivals have tested Dutch public opinion.
The political mood around immigration in the Netherlands has hardened considerably since the early 2000s. Integration requirements have been tightened repeatedly. The concept of multiculturalism, once a point of progressive pride in Dutch policy, has been largely abandoned in favour of demands for assimilation. Even the Dutch liberal party, D66, which narrowly won the 2025 snap elections, campaigned on a platform of integration rather than on separate cultural identity. In Rotterdam, the D66 became the city’s largest party after support for Geert Wilders’ right-wing PVV dropped by six percentage points.
While Rotterdam has pursued some of the most assertive integration policies of any Dutch city, including restrictions on settling in certain districts without passing a civic integration test, it has become, structurally and irreversibly, a majority-immigrant city. By 2010, fewer than half of Rotterdam's residents were of Dutch ethnic origin. Ahmed Aboutaleb, the city’s Morocco-born mayor from 2009 to 2024, called it a reality that needed to be managed well. For him, all the 180 nationalities were Rotterdammers.
Fenix, a museum of migration
Perhaps the most eloquent statement of how Rotterdam has come to understand its own identity is the opening, in May 2025, of Fenix, the world's first art museum dedicated entirely to the theme of migration. It is housed in a meticulously restored 1923 warehouse on the Katendrecht peninsula that once formed part of the Holland America Line's vast docking complex, from whose quays millions of migrants departed for new lives in America and Canada. The museum was designed by Beijing-based architect Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, himself an immigrant of sorts to European cultural life.
At its heart is the Tornado, a striking 30-metre double-helix staircase of polished stainless steel that rises through the warehouse and opens onto a panoramic view of the Maas and the Rotterdam skyline. The museum's collection brings together art, photography, historical artefacts, and 2,000 donated suitcases, each one a personal story. Its location is fitting in another way too: Katendrecht was the site of continental Europe's first Chinatown, established by Chinese sailors around 1900. The museum's director has quoted a Rotterdam poet: "If everybody comes from somewhere else, then nobody is a stranger."
Rotterdammers of influence
Desiderius Erasmus (born Rotterdam, c.1469): Erasmus was not an immigrant but an emigrant, who spent his life moving between the intellectual centres of Europe: Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Turin, Bologna, Venice, Basel.
He was the most celebrated humanist scholar of the Renaissance, the author of In Praise of Folly, and a fierce critic of Church corruption whose work helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the Reformation, even though he never broke with Rome. He died in Basel in 1536, having spent scarcely any time in his birthplace as an adult. Yet Rotterdam has claimed him entirely, the Erasmus Bridge, the Erasmus University, the Erasmus Medical Centre all bear his name. There is a pleasing irony in the fact that the city's most famous son was himself a perpetual wanderer, never settling anywhere. Rotterdam, a city defined by the movement of people, has chosen as its patron saint a man who never stopped moving.
Pierre Bayle (1647–1706): Bayle arrived in Rotterdam in 1681 as a Huguenot refugee, having fled France after the suppression of the Protestant Academy at Sedan, where he had been teaching. He would spend the remaining 25 years of his life in the city, becoming known as ‘the Philosopher of Rotterdam’.
His masterwork, the Dictionnaire historique et critique (Historical and Critical Dictionary), published in 1697, was among the most widely read works of the 18th century and a foundational text of the Enlightenment. Voltaire called him ‘the greatest master of the art of reasoning that ever wrote’.
Bayle's own experience of religious persecution gave his arguments for tolerance a personal urgency: his brother had died in a damp prison cell for refusing to convert to Catholicism. Working in Rotterdam, a city that had taken him in precisely because of its tolerance, he produced some of the most influential arguments for freedom of conscience ever written. He was, in the most literal sense, a refugee whose arrival enriched his host city immeasurably.
Pim Fortuyn (1948–2002): Fortuyn was born not in Rotterdam but in Driehuis in North Holland, and built his early career as an academic at Erasmus University. He adopted Rotterdam as his base and the city as his political launching pad. His rise and assassination have been described above in this article.
He is a necessary figure in any honest account of Rotterdam's immigration story because he did not merely reflect attitudes that already existed; he shaped them, made them spoken openly, and bequeathed them to Dutch politics in a form that has not dissipated in the more than two decades since his death. A statue of him stands in the city centre, and his party, Leefbaar Rotterdam, continues to hold seats on the city council.
Ahmed Aboutaleb (born Beni Sidel, Morocco, 1961): Aboutaleb arrived in the Netherlands at the age of 15, the son of a Riffian Berber imam from the Nador province of Morocco, moving to join his father, who was already in the country. He learned Dutch, studied electrical engineering, worked as a journalist and then a civil servant, and rose through the Labour Party to become alderman in Amsterdam and then State Secretary for Social Affairs. In 2009, he was appointed Mayor of Rotterdam, the first mayor of any large Dutch city to be of both immigrant origin and Muslim faith. The appointment was made despite fierce opposition from Leefbaar Rotterdam, which questioned his loyalty on the grounds of his Moroccan birth and Muslim religion. He served for fifteen years, until stepping down in 2024.
Aboutaleb's mayoralty was characterised by a blunt, no-nonsense approach that defied easy categorisation. He told immigrants, including his fellow Muslims, that if they did not accept the freedoms of Dutch society, they should "pack your bags and leave", remarks that earned him praise from Boris Johnson and condemnation from others on the left. He pursued aggressive integration policies while simultaneously championing the city's diversity.
He launched the National Programme Rotterdam South, a long-term regeneration initiative targeting the city's most deprived immigrant-heavy districts. He enforced curfews during the 2021 Covid riots. He was awarded the 2021 World Mayor Prize by the City Mayors Foundation, a recognition of his commitment to treating all residents of Rotterdam, regardless of their origins, as Rotterdammers. His last speech as mayor ended with the words: "But as a Rotterdammer I will remain, that is what you have made me."
The story ‘Rotterdam, an immigrant city’ is the second in our series Immigrant Cities. In the coming weeks, in addition to Liverpool and Rotterdam, The Immigrant Times will also feature the port cities of Marseille and New Orleans.
Please email the Editor if you wish to suggest other cities for the series ‘Immigrant Cities’.
Sources: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Council of Europe / Intercultural Cities Programme; Migration Policy Institute; Springer Nature; Leiden University; The World Mayor Project / City Mayors Foundation; Minority Rights Group; Our Migration Story; Verzetsmuseum; EHNE (Encyclopédie d'histoire numérique de l'Europe); The Art Newspaper; Fenix Museum; NL Times; Robert Schuman Foundation; Governance of Migration and Diversity; Centre for European Reform; Wikipedia
Further reading from The Immigrant Times: Immigrant Cities: Liverpool || Dutch election winner promises controlled but humane immigration || Zwolle demonstrates offers civility when debating immigration ||
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