People joining their families was the biggest reason for migration to the Netherlands in 2015, the Dutch statistics service announced on Monday.

The CBS says that a third of the 159,000 people who migrated to the country in 2015 came to join family members already here.

In 2003, half came for this reason, although since the number of migrants has increased, this figure was 36,655 compared with 51,920 in 2015.

There was a dramatic rise in asylum-related migration in 2015, to almost 27,000, but more people actually moved to the Netherlands for work that year, and almost 20,000 came to study.

Most of those joining their families came from Poland, Syria, Germany, India and the UK in 2015. The figures exclude people of Dutch nationality moving to the country.