The "guest workers" who came to build the Dutch economy — and stayed
Part of: Dutch History
Gastarbeiders — guest workers — were the men recruited from southern Europe and North Africa to fill labour shortages in the booming Dutch economy of the 1960s and early 1970s. The word says everything about the expectation: guests, not settlers. They would work, then go home.
They didn't go home.
After the post-war recovery, the Dutch economy grew fast. Manufacturing industries — steelworks like Hoogovens, electronics like Philips, the port of Rotterdam, textile factories in the east — couldn't find enough Dutch workers. The government signed bilateral recruitment agreements: first with Italy, Spain, Greece, and Yugoslavia; then Turkey in 1964; Morocco five years later.
Most arrivals were men in their twenties, performing heavy industrial labour under hard conditions. They were welcomed when the economy needed them.
The plan was temporary. The reality was permanent. Workers sent money home, visited family, and planned to return — then delayed, then delayed again. When the Dutch government ended recruitment in the 1970s as manufacturing declined, many workers were already embedded: they had rented rooms, built social networks, learned the city.
The Family Reunification Act of 1974 changed everything. Workers could now bring their wives and children. What had been a labour arrangement became a family migration. Turkish and Moroccan communities — initially scattered single men in industrial towns — became established communities with mosques, shops, schools, and associations.
The gastarbeiders and their descendants transformed the Netherlands into an immigration country, whether Dutch society was ready for that or not. The Turkish and Moroccan communities that arrived this way are now into their second and third generations — Dutch citizens, born here, shaped by here, sometimes still navigating what "here" means for people whose parents were always framed as temporary.
The Dutch response evolved through several phases: indifference in the 1960s, the multicultural model from the 1970s (give communities their own institutions, and integration will follow), and then the sharp assimilationist turn of the 2000s after Pim Fortuyn and the political upheaval around migration policy.
The second generation produced Dutch writers, artists, politicians, and professionals. Murat Isik — whose novel Wees onzichtbaar won the Libris Literature Prize in 2018 — wrote directly from this experience: the son of Turkish gastarbeiders, growing up between two worlds.
The gastarbeiders story is the origin point for the most contested questions in Dutch politics today. When politicians debate asielbeleid, integration, Islam in the Netherlands, or what it means to be Dutch, they are — knowingly or not — still arguing about the consequences of decisions made in 1964 and 1974.
The gastarbeiders are part of the Canon van Nederland.
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