The history lesson is served on the coffee table, between two glasses of red and two shot glasses. The first are Portuguese who arrived in the Netherlands 50 years ago, to work at Schiphol Airport, in workshops and cleaning hotels, at the same time as many other migrants headed to more common destinations such as France, Luxembourg or Germany. They worked for years without knowing the weekend, and now, retired, with Dutch children and grandchildren, they spend their time playing Swedish or dominoes, without missing a glass of wine, in the Portuguese Immigrants' Association, the last to resist in Amsterdam. In recent years, new people have started coming to the counter. Portuguese also qualified, in their 30s, many of them connected to technology fields. They come at the end of the work day and park their bikes at the door. Sometimes they call ahead to order a drink and always end up joining in the conversation. It is one of the smaller countertop guesthouses.
There are late afternoons at the Portuguese Association in Amsterdam – “APA”, to customers – which serves as a kind of mirror to replacing generations of Portuguese in the Netherlands. This is because this is one of the destinations where immigration has grown the most recently – mostly young people. Since the beginning of the century, the number of arrivals to the country has quadrupled, reaching 4,500 in 2022, according to Migration Observatory data. In that year, for the first time, more Portuguese went to the Netherlands than to Luxembourg. Within two decades the population has doubled: 25,000 Portuguese now live throughout the country. This jump occurred more strongly after Brexit in 2020, which caused a sudden decline in immigration to the UK. “The Netherlands could become the successor to the United Kingdom,” sums up Rui Peña Pires, scientific coordinator of the Migration Observatory.
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