The Platform Surinaamse Diaspora (PSD) is calling on the government to start arranging visa-free travel to the Netherlands for Suriname passport holders.
The demand was made by the board member of PSD, Ramnarain Rambaratsingh who called on the Surinamese Foreign Minister, Albert Ramdin to initiate a visa facilitation agreement for Surinamese, Schengen.News reports.
Our personal data is now somewhere with a private organisation, which is worrying. We request Minister Ramdin contact his Dutch colleague to arrange for Surinamese people to be able to travel to the Netherlands without a visa for the time being, upon payment of the visa costs.
PSD Cites “Visa on Arrival” Agreements as Examples for the Government to Follow
Rambaratsingh also pointed out that by adopting a visa facilitation agreement, the two communities, the Surinamese diaspora in the Netherlands and the Surinamese residents, will come together even further.
The board member noted the recent example where Greece adopted a special visa programme for Turkish passport holders, which allows tourists from Türkiye to enter without a Schengen visa.
This has improved relations between the two population groups.
According to statistics published, Surinamese nationals’ most preferred destination to apply for Schengen visas is the Netherlands. In 2023, Surinamese filed 19,891 visa applications, with only 40 applications being filed to France and the rest being directed to the Netherlands.
The approval rate for Surinamese applicants is on average 83.7 per cent, the same as the approval rate of the Netherlands. In 2023, a total of 3,049 visa applications by Surinamese were rejected.
Surinamese Are One of the Most Integrated Groups in Dutch Society
According to Statista, there were 359,800 Surinamese nationals residing in the Netherlands in 2022, which is up from the previous year.
Statistics Netherlands (CBS) has previously revealed that nearly half (48 per cent) of all Dutch of Surinamese origin are also born in the Netherlands, which is a result of the migration wave of Surinamese that was recorded in the 1970s.
This wave of migration was followed by the independence of Suriname from the Netherlands in 1975, with nearly 40,000 people migrating to the Netherlands. Surinamese was a colony of the Netherlands and Dutch is widely spoken there. This can be one of the reasons why Surinamese are so well integrated into Dutch society.
Another reason, as cited by an article by Humanity Inaction is that the Surinamese began their migration to the Netherlands over 50 years ago, thus, the migration has changed and they no longer migrate in large numbers like the Turkish and Moroccan communities do to Germany and other countries in the EU.
