Moroccan Retirees in the Netherlands: Their Children Forced to Pay the Bills

The disparity is striking. While only 3 to 6% of retirees of Dutch or European origin live in precarity, this figure climbs to 40% for immigrants from Morocco and Turkey. According to information from Dutch media RTL, this vulnerability is explained by the basic pension system (AOW. To receive a full allocation, one must have resided fifty years in the Netherlands. Each missing year results in a 2% reduction in the final amount, heavily penalizing this generation.

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To this truncated basic retirement is added the weakness of supplementary pensions. Jelle Lössbroek, researcher at the Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI), emphasizes that these workers evolved in poorly remunerated sectors. "During the years they were active, they often earned fewer euros per hour than Dutch people without a migration background," he explains, adding that they consequently accumulated "less pension per euro earned." Today, the bill for these inequalities is being paid at a steep price.

This precarity generates stress, a sense of shame, health problems, and social isolation. The financial burden often falls on their children, forced to dig into their pockets to cover their parents’ fixed expenses, as exemplified by a witness named Tarik. The scale of the problem continues to grow: the number of immigrant retirees has risen from 200,000 at the beginning of the century to 400,000 today, with a projection of 900,000 by 2050, affecting predominantly the most vulnerable segments.

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Faced with this situation, a government safety net exists: the supplementary income provision for elderly persons (AIO. Yet at least one-third of eligible recipients are unaware of it or afraid to apply. Tarik Uçar, a leader within the pension fund of the cleaning sector, notes that even when this aid is known, "there is often great fear of having to repay or having allocations reduced." This fear, partly linked to the country’s recent benefits scandal, pushes many retirees to forgo their rights.