Why Community Matters More Than You Expect When You Move Abroad

Most people preparing to move abroad focus their planning on visas, salaries, and housing, and underestimate how much day-to-day life ends up depending on community instead. A widely cited 2020 InterNations Expat Insider survey found that 52 percent of expats in the Netherlands found it difficult to make friends with locals, well above the 38 percent global average, with only 11 percent saying their main friendships were with Dutch locals.

That gap does not close itself. It gets filled, one way or another, and for most people it gets filled by other expats and by their own cultural community rather than by the local population, at least in the first few years.

Why This Catches People Off Guard

Before moving, most of the mental preparation goes into the visible, checklist parts of relocation: the BSN, the visa, the apartment. Community rarely makes that list, because it feels like something that will simply happen once you are settled. In practice, it is one of the few things that genuinely requires deliberate effort in the Netherlands specifically, given how the same survey found a fifth of internationals here experience the Dutch as unfriendly toward foreign residents.

What Community Actually Provides, Practically

Beyond friendship, a community you can rely on solves problems faster than any government website or forum thread. Knowing which gemeente appointment slots move fastest, which paediatrician speaks your language, which grocery store actually stocks what you are craving, this is the kind of practical knowledge that spreads through community networks long before it appears in any official guide.

Building It Deliberately

Since the local integration described in the survey does not happen automatically, the more reliable path is building your own network deliberately: joining a cultural or professional association, attending recurring community events like Diwali celebrations, and staying active in local Indian and South Asian groups rather than waiting for organic local friendships to form on their own timeline. None of this replaces trying to build local Dutch friendships too, but it does mean you are not depending on that alone while it slowly develops.

The Business Side of Community Too

Community is not only a personal support system, it is also where trust in local businesses actually forms. A recommendation from someone in your own community carries more weight than a generic online review, which is exactly why business directories built around a specific community, rather than a general one, tend to be more useful for the people actually searching them.

This is the whole reason DesiBiz exists, not as a replacement for building your own relationships, but as the infrastructure that makes finding your community, and the businesses that serve it, faster from the very first week you arrive.

References

• Netherlands ranked as one of the world's worst countries for making friends (IamExpat)