The Invisible Dutch - a Pilot Study Evaluating Dutch Migrants’ Path to New Zealand from 1996 to 2006. NCRE Online Paper No. 06/02, August 2006

[From the Introduction]. Are the Dutch in New Zealand invisible? It seems to be a good way of describing Dutch immigrants to New Zealand, especially when looking at the last ten years. There is not much known on the movements of recent Dutch immigrants, nor are records available how to contact them. The Netherlands government, represented at the Royal Netherlands Embassy, keeps no records of Dutch immigrants to New Zealand. According to arrival statistics there are at least a few thousand of (former) Dutch residents in New Zealand who arrived from 1996 onwards. Only in 2005/2006 1702 work permits have been approved for Dutch citizens and over the last five years approximately 2000 residence permits have been submitted and approved1. These numbers do not seem to be very impressive on a population of approximately four million, but even then can make a difference in a country that is economical dependent on the supply of immigrants. There is quite a lot of recent research available on immigrants, but research conducted at recent immigrants from specific ethnicities or nationalities is scarce, especially on smaller immigration groups like the Dutch nowadays. Research documents produced by the Department of Labour (2002; , 2006b; , 2006) mostly produce aggregated data for regions like Europe and Russia or Western Europe and the United States. In previous research Dutch migrants were often mentioned as a separate group, nowadays the Dutch seem to have lost their special position and differentiations undertaken less frequent. Where research exists on recent migration groups, this research has a strong econometric accent and is mainly based on a comparison of groups through data from New Zealand Statistics (Boyd, 2003; Poot & Cochrane, 2005; Winkelmann, 2000, 2002; Winkelmann & Winkelmann, 1998a, 1998b). Although these analyses are very useful, they do not differentiate between recent Dutch migrants and migrants that have been in New Zealand for a much longer period