Feitenkaart Jemenitische Nederlanders

Headline: from near-automatic protection to restrictive policy

Between 2023 and 2025 the share of Yemeni asylum applications granted at first instance in the Netherlands fell from about 99% to about 30%. The Yemeni-background population of the Netherlands, over roughly the same period, more than tripled. Both statements rest on official data, and together they frame this document.

Two causes, not one

The fall has more than one cause, and the responsible Minister has said so. Answering parliamentary questions on 20 February 2026, Minister Van Weel began: "Het inwilligingspercentage laat zich niet makkelijk verklaren" — the recognition rate does not lend itself to easy explanation. For Yemen he named two developments.

• The Yemeni country policy changed substantially in 2024. A generic protection policy for people from Yemen was replaced by individual assessment.
• A large number of Yemeni cases had been decided under the old policy, in the IND's project Bespoediging Afdoening Asiel (BAA), which ran from 1 May 2023 and ended in mid-2024. In the Minister's words: "Vanwege het grote aantal en hoge inwilligingspercentage van deze zaken heeft dat invloed op de ontwikkelingen in de inwilligingscijfers."

BAA was an acceleration project that deliberately concentrated on Syrian and Yemeni applications which, under the country policy then in force, qualified quickly for approval. Its cases were therefore, by design, disproportionately approvals — and they fall in the 2023 and 2024 decision years. Section 7 sets out the sequence; section 2 explains why this matters for reading the series.

SourceKamervragen 2026Z00589, answered by Minister D.M. van Weel (Asiel en Migratie) on 20 February 2026. Retrieved 16 July 2026.

The population

On 1 January 2022 there were 3,805 residents of the Netherlands with a Yemeni background. On 1 January 2026 there were 12,494 — an increase of 228% in four years.

SourceCBS StatLine 85384NED, Bevolking; geslacht, leeftijd, herkomstland en geboorteland (ouders), 1 januari. Herkomstland code Jemen (H008640). Figures definitive; table updated 3 June 2026; retrieved 16 July 2026.

NoteOwn calculation The percentage is an own calculation: (12,494 − 3,805) ÷ 3,805 = 228.4%.

The two movements together

The population grew and the recognition rate fell in the same period, and the two are not in tension. The population grew because of decisions taken in and before 2024 — many of them, as above, accelerated through BAA — and because family reunification, not new asylum applications, became the dominant channel of arrival. The recognition rate fell because the country policy was rewritten and the acceleration project ended. A community was formed under one policy regime and now lives under another.

A third fact completes the picture. Subsidiary protection — the generic, country-wide ground — fell from 1,675 grants in 2023 to 50 in 2025. Over the same period, individually assessed refugee status rose from 35 to 90. Protection did not disappear; the automatic route to it closed.

SourceEurostat, migr_asydcfsta, breakdown by type of positive decision. Retrieved 16 July 2026.

See it for yourself

The sections that follow set the record out in words and tables. This one lets you look at it directly. Choose a view and a range of years; every point carries its source, and hovering or tapping shows the exact figure behind it.

These are the Netherlands alone. To set the same measures against the other European reporting states, use the full explorer on Yemeni Nationals in Europe.

Methodology

This section states what was done, so that a reader can judge it and reproduce it.

2.1 Sources and why they are authoritative

Every figure in this document derives from a primary official source. No figure is taken from an aggregator, a news report, or a secondary summary. Four bodies supply the quantitative material:

• Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS), the Dutch national statistical institute, for population by country of origin and for asylum and integration statistics. CBS figures used here are marked definitive.
• Immigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst (IND), the Dutch immigration service, for asylum applications, family reunification and the arrival profile. The IND is the administrative body of record: its Asylum Trends series reports the case data it itself processes.
• Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, for first-instance decision counts. Member states report these under a common legal framework, which is what makes decision outcomes comparable over time.
• The Staatscourant, the Tweede Kamer and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for policy instruments, parliamentary correspondence and country reporting. These are the legal and political record itself, not descriptions of it.

Where a figure exists in more than one of these sources, both are reported and any difference is quantified rather than resolved (see 2.4).

2.2 Definition of every derived measure

Figures that Tharan calculated, rather than read from a source, are labelled "own calculation" wherever they appear. There are three such measures, defined here:

The recognition rate is not published by anyone — it is derived from published decision counts. Those counts come from one dataset, and you can go and read it yourself:

For 2025 the dataset returns 540 total first-instance decisions and 160 positive decisions: 160 ÷ 540 = 29.63%, reported as 29.6%.

2.3 Known limitations

• Eurostat rounds every cell to the nearest 5. This bounds the precision of all Eurostat-derived counts and of the rates calculated from them. It also means components need not sum exactly to totals (see 2.4). No recognition rate is reported for years before 2017, because the annual decision counts in those years are between 10 and 35 and a percentage on such numbers would be spurious precision.
• Decisions are counted by year of decision, not year of application. A case lodged in 2024 and decided in 2025 appears in the 2025 figures. The IND applies the same convention and states it: "Voor het inwilligingspercentage is gekeken naar het jaar van afdoening."
• No official Yemen-specific recognition rate exists. The IND does not publish recognition rates by nationality — Asylum Trends contains none for any nationality — and when asked directly in parliamentary questions in February 2026, the Minister supplied only a total and a total excluding Syrians. The Eurostat-based own calculation used here exists because the official figure does not.
• The Pharos sleutelpersonen finding in section 8 is Tharan's own tally of a public listing, recorded on 16 July 2026. It is based on listed place of residence, not area of service, and covers Pharos-trained sleutelpersonen only. Pharos publishes no aggregate figures for this pool.
• The IND arrival profile in section 3 describes first asylum applications lodged between January 2012 and August 2022. It is not a description of the community as it stands today, and section 6 shows why.

2.4 A caution on reading the recognition rate as a trend

2.5 Treatment of discrepancy and uncertainty

Where official sources disagree, this document states both figures and the size of the difference rather than selecting one silently. Three such cases arise, and each is marked where it occurs:

• The IND's national counts and Eurostat's counts differ by 0 to 6 across the overlapping years 2012–2021, with the IND count equal to or higher in nine of ten years. The IND attributes such differences to "definitieverschillen en afrondingen" — definitional differences and rounding. Rounding alone does not account for all of them.
• Two IND figures exist for 2021: 1,193 in the December 2022 analysis, and 1,189 in the Asylum Trends series. This document uses 1,189 and reports both.
• The April 2025 country report carries two dates in the official record — 30 April on the document, 18 April in the instruments citing it. Both are stated in section 7.

Rounding artifacts are annotated rather than adjusted. In 2022 and 2025 the published positive and negative decision counts sum to five more than the published total; in 2022 and 2024 the protection-type components differ from the published positive total by five. These arise from independent rounding of each cell. This document reports the published cells and notes the discrepancy; it does not alter a published figure to force a sum.

2.6 Standard followed

Group profile: who is here

Definition

CBS records a person's herkomstland as their own country of birth if they were born abroad. For people born in the Netherlands, it is the country of birth of the mother — or of the father, where the mother was born in the Netherlands or her birth country is unknown. The figure of 12,494 therefore includes both people born in Yemen and their Netherlands-born children.

SourceCBS, table description 85384NED. Retrieved 16 July 2026.

Arrival profile

The most detailed profile of Yemeni arrivals in the Netherlands is an IND analysis published in December 2022. It covers 4,407 first asylum applications lodged between 1 January 2012 and 1 August 2022. Its findings describe that cohort.

SourceIND, Analyse instroom Jemenieten (T. Maasland, R. Tavares, C. van der Wolff), Directie Strategie en Uitvoeringsadvies, Afdeling Onderzoek en Analyse, December 2022, 42 pp., status: Definitief. Retrieved 16 July 2026.

Arrival: the full time series, 2010–2026

The chart below gives Yemeni asylum applications in the Netherlands for every year from 2010. Two independent official sources are shown side by side, because they use slightly different definitions and Eurostat rounds to the nearest 5. Where they differ, the difference is stated rather than resolved.

On the difference between the two sources

Across the ten overlapping years the two counts differ by 0 to 6, and the IND's count is equal to or higher than Eurostat's in nine of them. The IND itself attributes such differences to "definitieverschillen en afrondingen" — definitional differences and rounding. Rounding to the nearest 5 does not by itself account for every case: the 2015 difference of six exceeds what rounding can produce. The two series are consistent in shape and should not be treated as interchangeable in level.

On the two 2021 figures

The IND's December 2022 analysis gives 1,193 first applications for 2021. The IND's Asylum Trends series gives 1,189. Both are IND national data; the difference of four is most likely a matter of extraction date or case-type definition. This document uses 1,189, from the maintained Asylum Trends series. The two are not the same number and are not presented as such.

What the series shows

Read plainly, the series does not follow the shape often assumed. Four observations follow from the figures above.

• There is no Arab Spring wave in the Dutch data. In 2011 there were 10 Yemeni first-time asylum applicants in the Netherlands; in 2012, 25. The events of 2011 did not produce Yemeni asylum migration to the Netherlands.
• There is no immediate war effect either. Yemen's civil war began in 2015. That year there were 50 first-time applicants — fewer than in 2013 on the IND's own count. The rise begins two to three years later.
• The inflection is 2017–2018. Applications move from 45 (2016) to 170 (2017) to 530 (2018) and continue upward, apart from a dip in 2020 that the IND attributes explicitly to Covid-19 travel restrictions. The peak is 2022, at 2,428 first applications.
• The fall begins after 2022 and steepens from 2024. By 2025 first applications were 506, roughly a fifth of the peak. In 2026 the direction has reversed: 433 applications in the first five months alone.

The IND's own analysis records that this rise made the Netherlands the main European destination for Yemeni asylum seekers: 40.68% of all Yemeni first asylum applications in the EU+ were lodged in the Netherlands in 2021, and 46.07% in January–July 2022. Before that, Sweden received the largest numbers (2012–2015), then Germany (2016–2020).

SourceIND, Analyse instroom Jemenieten, December 2022, Tabel 1 and Tabel 8 (Eurostat basis). "EU+" is defined there as the EU member states plus Norway, Iceland and Switzerland; the United Kingdom is excluded. Retrieved 16 July 2026.

Status and protection

The Netherlands does not publish a recognition rate for Yemeni nationals. Neither the IND's Asylum Trends reports nor its annual figures give recognition rates by nationality; Asylum Trends contains no recognition rates at all, for any nationality. Asked directly in parliamentary questions in February 2026 for nationality-level rates, the Minister supplied only a total and a total excluding Syrians.

SourceIND, Asylum Trends (monthly reports). Kamervragen 2026Z00589, answered 20 February 2026. Retrieved 16 July 2026.

The figures below are therefore own calculations from Eurostat's published decision counts, as defined in section 2.

Reading the 2023–2025 movement

The fall from 99.1% (2023) to 29.6% (2025) reflects two developments, both named by the Minister of Asylum and Migration in his answer of 20 February 2026, and neither of which the official record quantifies separately.

• The Yemeni country policy was substantially rewritten. Until March 2024 a generic protection policy applied; it was replaced by individual assessment, and further narrowed in October 2025. Section 7 sets out the instruments.
• The BAA acceleration project ended. Between May 2023 and August 2024 the IND concentrated on Syrian and Yemeni cases that qualified quickly for approval under the policy then in force. Those decisions fall in the 2023 and 2024 decision years and were, by design, disproportionately approvals.

The Minister's own words are the safest formulation: "Het inwilligingspercentage laat zich niet makkelijk verklaren." The rate does not lend itself to easy explanation. This document reports the counts, states both causes, and does not attribute a share to either.

SourceKamervragen 2026Z00589, answered by Minister D.M. van Weel on 20 February 2026. Retrieved 16 July 2026.

What kind of protection

The composition of positive decisions changed more sharply than their number.

In 2023, 1,675 of 1,730 positive decisions — 97% — were grants of subsidiary protection, the ground available to applicants from a country assessed as generally unsafe. By 2025 that had fallen to 50. Over the same period refugee status, which requires an individual claim of persecution, rose from 35 to 90; the 2025 figure is the highest in the series.

This is the statistical signature of the policy change described in section 7: the country-wide ground narrowed, and what remains is individual assessment.

NoteOwn calculation Own calculation: positive ÷ total first-instance decisions, in the year of decision. In two years the components do not sum to the published total, because Eurostat rounds each cell independently to the nearest 5: in 2022, 1,240 + 15 = 1,255 against a published total of 1,250; in 2025, 160 + 385 = 545 against a published total of 540. The rates use the published total as the denominator. For 2025, using the component sum instead would give 29.4% rather than 29.6%; the finding is unaffected. Published figures are reported as published and are not adjusted to force a sum.

Permits granted

CBS reports asylum permits granted to Yemeni nationals at 1,730 in 2024 and 695 in the first half of 2025. In the 2023 permit cohort Yemen ranked second of all nationalities by asylum permits granted; in the first half of 2025 it ranked third on that same measure. A ranking by permits granted and a ranking by first applications lodged count different things in different years, and the two will not agree — neither corrects the other.

SourceCBS, Asiel en integratie 2026, 2014–eerste helft 2025, table 3.1.1. Published 7 May 2026; retrieved 16 July 2026. CBS names Jemen as one of the nationalities it distinguishes separately.

Recent flow: 2024–2026

First applications: first half of 2024 against first half of 2025

SourceIND, Asylum Trends June 2024 (monthly figures 132, 162, 178, 128, 129, 80) and Asylum Trends November 2025 (monthly figures 22, 49, 12, 26, 21, 37). Retrieved 16 July 2026.

NoteOwn calculation (167 − 809) ÷ 809 = −79.4%, reported as −79%. Both totals are sums of the published monthly figures listed above; no value in the Yemen row is masked by the IND's 0–4 suppression rule.

CBS measures a related but different quantity — inflow into COA reception — and reports 1,250 Yemeni arrivals in the first half of 2024 against 660 in the first half of 2025, a fall of about 47%. CBS states: "In de eerste helft van 2025 is de instroom uit Jemen gedaald (660). Dit is bijna de helft van het aantal in de eerste helft van 2024 (1250)." COA inflow and IND first applications are different measures and are not to be combined.

SourceCBS, Asiel en integratie 2026, table 2.1.1 and accompanying text. Published 7 May 2026; retrieved 16 July 2026.

Family reunification is now the larger stream

This is the most consequential change in the recent data, and the one least visible in public discussion of Yemeni migration.

In 2025, Yemeni family reunification (1,476, full year) was roughly three times the number of Yemeni first asylum applications (506, full year). Yemen was the second-largest nationality in Dutch family reunification over the twelve months to May 2026, accounting for 9% of the national total, behind Syria.

CBS reports the same movement independently: approximately 1,500 nareizigers from Yemen in 2025, an increase of 76% on the previous year. Two official sources, two methods, the same finding.

SourceCBS, news release "Minder asielaanvragen, meer nareizigers in 2025", published 30 January 2026: "Ook kwamen 1,5 duizend nareizigers uit Jemen, dit is 76 procent meer dan een jaar eerder." Retrieved 16 July 2026.

The policy story: why the numbers moved

The fall in the recognition rate is not a change in who applies. It is a change in how applications were assessed, and in which applications were decided when. Five documented steps account for it.

Step 0 — May 2023: the BAA acceleration project

On 1 May 2023 the IND began project Bespoediging Afdoening Asiel (BAA), an additional measure to clear its backlog. The Staatssecretaris of Justice and Security described its design to parliament on 13 July 2023:

Three features of this matter for reading the statistics. BAA named only two nationalities: Syrians and Yemenis. It selected cases on the criterion that they qualified quickly for approval under the country policy then in force. And its target was 13,000 additional decisions in its first year — a large number relative to the Yemeni caseload.

SourceKamerstuk 19637, nr. 3156, Brief van de Staatssecretaris van Justitie en Veiligheid (E. van der Burg), 13 July 2023; published 25 July 2023. Retrieved 16 July 2026.

A later letter described the method plainly as "het versneld afhandelen van evident kansrijke asielaanvragen van Syriërs en Jemenieten door schriftelijk horen" — the accelerated handling of evidently likely-to-succeed asylum applications from Syrians and Yemenis, by written hearing.

Step 1 — October 2023: written hearings abolished, BAA extended

On 10 October 2023 the Tweede Kamer adopted a motion by members Brekelmans (VVD) and Van den Brink (CDA) requiring the government to abolish written hearings for likely-to-succeed asylum seekers and to ensure the IND always conducts a physical hearing in such cases. The Staatssecretaris reported the consequence on 19 December 2023:

BAA therefore ran from 1 May 2023 to 1 August 2024, three months longer than planned.

SourceKamerstuk 19637, nr. 3184, Brief van de Staatssecretaris van Justitie en Veiligheid (E. van der Burg), 19 December 2023; published 28 December 2023. Retrieved 16 July 2026.

Step 2 — March 2024: individual assessment replaces a blanket presumption

Until March 2024 the Dutch country policy for Yemen held that everyone in Yemen ran a risk of becoming a victim of indiscriminate violence sufficient, on that ground alone, to grant asylum. Yemeni applications were processed on an accelerated, project basis because, in the IND's words, they "almost always had a right to asylum".

Following a judgment of the European Court of Justice on how such risk must be assessed, the IND moved to assessing each case individually, and Yemenis left the accelerated track. The IND stated at the time that existing permits would not be reassessed, because the security situation remained too worrying for that.

SourceIND, "IND will assess applications from Yemen individually for the risk of violence", last updated 18 March 2024; Kamerbrief 2024Z04502. Retrieved 16 July 2026.

Step 3 — April 2025: a new country report

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a general country report (algemeen ambtsbericht) on Yemen covering 1 September 2023 to 28 February 2025. It ran to 117 pages and provided the evidentiary basis for the policy revision that followed.

SourceMinisterie van Buitenlandse Zaken, Algemeen ambtsbericht Jemen april 2025. Document dated 30 April 2025; published online 2 October 2025. Retrieved 16 July 2026.

Step 4 — 2025: the Raad van State intervenes

The explanatory note to the October 2025 policy instrument records that the Afdeling bestuursrechtspraak of the Raad van State ruled that the Minister had insufficiently reasoned the position that Yemen did not present the most exceptional situation under Article 15(c) of the Qualification Directive — specifically, that humanitarian conditions resulting from the acts or omissions of an actor of serious harm had not been taken into account in that assessment. Together with the new country report, this ruling prompted the revision described below.

SourceAs recorded in the explanatory note to WBV 2025/20 (Staatscourant 2025, 35447). This document cites the ruling as described in that instrument and does not cite the judgment separately. Retrieved 16 July 2026.

Step 5 — 17 October 2025: the current country policy takes effect

Wijzigingsbesluit Vreemdelingencirculaire WBV 2025/20 was signed on 15 October 2025, published in the Staatscourant on 16 October 2025, and entered into force the following day. It rewrote paragraph C7/19 of the Vreemdelingencirculaire 2000. Three changes matter.

A province-by-province gradation replaced the country-wide assessment

SourceBesluit van de Minister van Asiel en Migratie van 15 oktober 2025, nummer WBV 2025/20, Staatscourant 2025, 35447. Signed on behalf of the Minister by R. Maas, directeur-generaal IND. Article II sets entry into force on the day after publication. Kamerbrief "Landenbeleid Jemen", Kamerstuk 19637-3489, 8 October 2025. Retrieved 16 July 2026.

An internal protection alternative was introduced. Applicants from the other nineteen provinces whose only risk arises from indiscriminate violence are, in principle, expected to relocate to Al Mahra or Hadramaut. Operationally this is the most significant element of the change.

The risk profiles were narrowed. "Joden" (Jews) was removed as a risk profile, on the reasoning that too few people now practise the Jewish faith in Yemen to maintain a group profile. The IND now recognises exactly six risk profiles for Yemen: muhammasheen; Christians; Baha'i; LHBTIQ+; journalists, activists and politically active persons; and single women and women who have made it plausible that they fear gender-related violence.

Protection by the Yemeni authorities continues to be assumed impossible. The provisions on adequate reception for unaccompanied minors were aligned with comparable paragraphs elsewhere in the Vreemdelingencirculaire, with no substantive change intended.

The sequence, and what it explains

Two of these steps bear on the recognition rate, and the Minister of Asylum and Migration named both when asked, on 20 February 2026, why the rate had fallen. He first cautioned that "het inwilligingspercentage laat zich niet makkelijk verklaren" — it does not lend itself to easy explanation — and that outcomes are shaped by the composition of the inflow, the situation in countries of origin, and policy changes together. On Yemen specifically he said:

So the movement from 99.1% to 29.6% is the product of a rewritten country policy and the conclusion of an acceleration project that had front-loaded likely approvals into 2023 and 2024. The official record names both and quantifies neither. This document does the same.

SourceKamervragen 2026Z00589, answered by Minister D.M. van Weel (Asiel en Migratie), mede namens de Minister voor Asiel en Migratie, 20 February 2026. Retrieved 16 July 2026.

Where people live

The one official route that does exist

CBS has published a maatwerk (custom) table, "Bevolking naar gemeente en herkomstland, 2016 en 2024", which does cross municipality with origin country. It is an Excel file published on 15 August 2024, giving figures for 1 January 2016 and 1 January 2024 — not for 2026. Obtaining a current figure would require a maatwerk request to CBS.

SourceCBS, maatwerk publication, 15 August 2024. Landing page retrieved 16 July 2026.

This document therefore states no figure for the number of Yemeni-background residents in Rotterdam or the Rijnmond region. An alternative proxy — municipal taakstelling figures for statushouders — measures a different population and is not substituted here.

An indirect indication: Pharos sleutelpersonen

Pharos, the national expertise centre on health inequalities, maintains a public map of its trained sleutelpersonen — community key figures who bridge between institutions and communities. Tharan examined this public listing on 16 July 2026 and counted the following.

• Two sleutelpersonen in the entire Netherlands are listed as born in Yemen. Their listed places of residence are Amsterdam and Veghel.
• Three sleutelpersonen are listed as resident in Rotterdam. Their listed countries of birth are Afghanistan, Syria and Syria. Two list Arabic among their languages.
• No sleutelpersonen at all are listed in Schiedam, Vlaardingen, Capelle aan den IJssel or Nissewaard.
• There is therefore no Yemeni sleutelpersoon listed anywhere in the Rijnmond region.

SourcePharos, Kaart Sleutelpersonen (public map, approximately 275 entries). Consulted 16 July 2026.

NoteOwn tally Pharos publishes no aggregate statistics on the composition of the sleutelpersonen pool, so these counts are Tharan's and not Pharos's. The map records listed place of residence, not area of service: a sleutelpersoon living elsewhere may work in Rijnmond. The map covers Pharos-trained sleutelpersonen only; people performing similar roles through municipal programmes or self-organisations are not listed. With those qualifications attached, the finding stands: Arabic-language capacity exists in Rotterdam, and it is Syrian in origin.

The knowledge gap

There is almost no Dutch research on the Yemeni community in the Netherlands. Tharan searched the publication catalogues of KIS (Kennisplatform Inclusief Samenleven), the SCP, the Verwey-Jonker Instituut, Movisie, the WODC and Nidi on 16 July 2026 and found no Yemen-specific study at any of them.

NoteThis is a negative finding and carries the limits of one. The KIS result was established through that site's own search index; the others rest on search-engine indexing. It should be read as a strong indication, not as proof of absence.

The one peer-reviewed study

As far as Tharan has been able to establish, one peer-reviewed empirical study exists whose subject is Yemeni people in the Netherlands:

Its scope is healthcare access and health literacy. It is based on thirteen interviews conducted in Arabic. It is a real, citable piece of empirical research, and it is the entire academic literature on this community.

What else exists

Four further bodies of work touch the community without taking it as their subject.

• IND, Analyse instroom Jemenieten (December 2022). Substantial and useful, but an administrative analysis of arrival, not of life in the Netherlands. It studies how people got here, not how they live here.
• A VU Amsterdam research project, PEACE WOMEN (Dr. E. K. Strzelecka, EU Horizon 2020 MSCA 101024992), on Yemeni women activists in exile, with fieldwork including the Netherlands. The closest existing work to diaspora research.
• Movisie (25 March 2024) ran focus groups with young newcomers from Yemen, Eritrea, Ukraine and Turkey. Yemenis appear, but not as the subject.
• Ministry of Justice and Security, "Bijlage 1 Instroom Syriërs en Jemenieten" (31 January 2024). An inflow annex.

A documented omission

In 2025 the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment commissioned a national study of diaspora communities, Verbonden & Veerkrachtig: De dynamiek tussen gemeenschappen en hun land van herkomst. It covered five communities: Chinese, Surinamese, Turkish, Moroccan and Eritrean-Dutch. The Yemeni community was not among them.

SourceLabyrinth Onderzoek & Advies, commissioned by the Ministerie van Sociale Zaken en Werkgelegenheid, 2025. Retrieved 16 July 2026.

The pattern in the official record is consistent. Yemeni people in the Netherlands are documented as a migration-control category — inflow, routes, decisions, smuggling signals — and are largely absent as a community. The statistical category exists; the social evidence does not.

What the data cannot tell you

This section is part of the document, not an appendix to it. A reference work is only as trustworthy as its account of its own limits.

Figures that do not exist

Six figures a reader might reasonably expect to find here are not published by any official source. Each is listed with what does exist in its place.

Two figures in circulation that must not be repeated

Both of the following appear in public material about this community. Both are wrong, and the reasons are documented here so that the correction is traceable.

Limits of what is presented here

• Eurostat rounds every cell to the nearest 5. All Eurostat-derived figures, and the rates calculated from them, carry that imprecision. It is why no rate is given before 2017, and why components do not always sum to totals (section 2.5).
• Recognition rates count decisions by year of decision, not year of application. A case lodged in 2024 and decided in 2025 appears in 2025.
• The Pharos finding is Tharan's own tally of a public listing, based on residence rather than service area, and covers Pharos-trained people only.
• The IND arrival profile describes applications lodged between 2012 and August 2022. It is not a description of the community today.
• The finding that almost no Dutch research exists is a negative claim established by catalogue search. It is a strong indication rather than proof of absence.
• The 2023 and 2024 recognition rates are affected by the BAA acceleration project, which selected likely approvals and whose decisions fall in those years. The 2023–2025 movement is not a clean measure of assessment practice alone. See section 2.4.

Sources

Every figure in this document derives from one of the sources below. All were retrieved on 16 July 2026.