Almost 23,000 people acquired Dutch nationality last year, slightly down on 2008, the national statistics office said on Monday.

The number of naturalisations has been relatively stable since a citizenship exam was made part of the process in 2003. Ten years ago, almost 50,000 people became Dutch.
By the beginning of this year, almost 1.2 million of the 17 million Dutch nationals also held a second nationality. The new government wants to make it much more difficult to have two nationalities.