Researchers from outside the EEA

This dashboard presents data from the Dutch Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND) on researchers from outside the European Economic Area in the Netherlands in 2022 and 2023. These researchers have a residence permit for researchers (Directive (EU) 2016/801) and work in the Netherlands as PhD candidates, paid researchers or unpaid researchers with a grant. They spend at least 50% of their time on research.

In this dashboard you can find information about the countries where the researchers come from* and where they work in the Netherlands. To limit the risk of traceability to individuals, values lower than 10 are not shown.

*Country of origin refers only to the researcher's registered ID and says nothing about the researcher's (previous) place of residence.

2023 Summary

• There were 15,810 researchers from outside the EEA holding a researcher residence permit (Directive (EU) 2016/801) in the Netherlands. In 2022, there were 15,360 researchers.
• The top 5 countries of origin were China, India, Iran, Turkey, and the United States.
• 81.1% of non-EEA researchers worked at a research university, while the share of non-EEA researchers at universities of applied sciences was remarkably low (0.4%). After research universities, (university) medical centres were the most common institution type (13.4%).
• The top 3 institutions where these researchers worked consisted entirely of technical universities: Delft University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology and Wageningen University. 37% of all non-EEA researchers worked at one of these three technical universities or at the University of Twente (8th place).
• Over one third of all non-EEA researchers were employed in South Holland. This was more than double the number of those working in North Brabant, the second largest destination for non-EEA researchers.
• The above findings are comparable with those of 2022.
  

Disclaimer

This dashboard is based on data from the IND on non-EEA researchers. For information about EEA researchers, please refer to the Rathenau Institute.
In 2023, 48.2% of academic staff at universities were from abroad (25.7% from EEA, 3.8% were European, but non-EEA, and 18.7% were not European or from unknown countries).

Note: Academic staff is a broader category than researchers. For academic staff there is no minimum amount of time spent on research. The Ratenau report only covers universities (excluding medical centers) and staff having a contract with a university. It therefore does not contain information about, for example, PhD students with a scholarship.