Navigating housing beyond arrival The trajectories of EU labour migrants in the Netherlands

The housing difficulties faced by EU labour migrants in the Netherlands have consistently drawn concern, particularly regarding their reliance on intermediaries such as employment agencies. Current understanding of labour migrants housing conditions presents a uniform and static understanding, dismissing how housing struggles can accumulate, diverge, or recede over time. This dissertation provides a more fine-grained and dynamic perspective on housing struggles using a longitudinal mixed-method approach. It shows how labour migrants’ housing trajectories can be progressive, stable, and at times even profitable, but also non-linear, messy, and persistently precarious. Crucially, these conditions are shaped not only by individual strategies, but also by the need to navigate an infrastructure built towards employment and temporariness yet rarely makes room for migrant housing stability.