A recent study by Belgium’s National Employment Office highlights the growing diversity among foreign nationals who are unemployed in Belgium.
After World War II, the Belgian economy strongly relied on foreign labour for reconstruction, and it was during this period that non-Belgians first became eligible for unemployment benefits.
The study’s authors note that this development led to a lasting presence of foreign nationalities, stemming from labour migration, in unemployment figures, a trend that continues today.
Labour migration, and to a lesser extent refugee flows, still have a significant impact on the demographic composition of unemployed foreign nationals in Belgium.
Due to large-scale labour migration and the decline of industries that initially attracted them, non-Belgians were heavily overrepresented in unemployment statistics from the 1960s to the 1990s.
In the 1970s, Italians made up more than half of the unemployed non-Belgians.
By the 2020s, the proportion of Italians had decreased to 13%, with French nationals becoming the largest group of unemployed non-Belgians in 2023, marking a significant shift in nearly seven decades.
Since 2015, the category “other nationalities” has continued to grow in importance. Nationalities connected to recent refugee flows, such as Ukrainians, also appear in the statistics on uninsured unemployed individuals.
The study’s authors stress that the challenge remains to improve the labour market position of individuals from immigrant backgrounds and combat discrimination.
