Verlenging naturalisatietermijnen

Reactie

Vraag1

Dear members of the House of Representatives,
I am writing to add my voice to the public consultation on the draft bill that would double the residence requirement for Dutch citizenship from five to ten years. I have lived and worked in the Netherlands for … years, pay taxes here, and have bought a home here. This proposal touches my family directly and I therefore respectfully submit the following comments for your consideration.
1.Integration is a two-way street: the moment newcomers feel secure enough to buy a house, accept a permanent contract or join the local parents’ council, they invest socially and economically. Keeping people in a decade-long “maybe” phase signals that society still regards them as temporary guests, which discourages the very participation the government wants to see.
2. The Dutch Highly Skilled Migrant schemes already compete with similar programmes in Germany, Sweden and Ireland. A ten-year path to citizenship instantly makes the Netherlands an outlier in Europe and will push mobile specialists – tech engineers, life-science researchers, AI graduates – to accept offers elsewhere. Once they leave, their start-ups, patents and PAYE taxes leave with them.
3. Children who have attended Dutch primary and secondary school for eight or nine years suddenly discover they cannot obtain the same passport as their classmates. This creates a two-tier playground and may force families to split up if parents decide to move to a country where their teenagers can obtain a stable nationality before university.
4. Research by the Dutch Statistics Office (CBS) shows that over 80 % of naturalisation applicants who arrived on skill migrants visas have above-average incomes and commit virtually no benefit fraud or crime. Bluntly extending the term bundles this group with the much smaller subset of asylum cases that may need longer evaluation, thereby punishing the wrong category.
5. Of the 27 EU member states, 22 already grant citizenship after 5–6 years of legal residence. Only a handful (Austria, Italy, Czechia) demand ten years or more. Instead of strengthening the Netherlands’ competitive position, the bill would place it next to the most restrictive regimes in Europe.

For these reasons I respectfully urge Parliament to reconsider the draft bill.