Of the 64,000 people from EU countries who arrived in the Netherlands in 2011, half came from Eastern Europe, with Poles topping the list with 19,000 immigrants, the central statistics office CBS said on Monday.

In the past half century, only Surinamers have formed a larger group of immigrants in one year. That was in 1975, the year Suriname became independent, when 38,000 Surinamers arrived in the Netherlands.
The new immigration figures are balanced by the 39,000 EU citizens who left the Netherlands last year, of which 15,000 returned to Eastern Europe, 7,000 of them to Poland, says the CBS.