On 1 January 2020, 23 million citizens of a non-member country lived in one of the EU Member States, representing 5.1% of the EU population. Highest shares of non-nationals was in Luxembourg, and the lowest in Poland and Romania.
In addition, there were 13.5 million people living in one of the EU Member States with the citizenship of another EU Member State, representing 3.0% of the EU population, reads the latest data of Eurostat.
In relative terms, the EU Member State with the highest share of non-national citizens was Luxembourg (47% of its total population).
A high proportion of foreign citizens (10% or more of the resident population) was also observed in Malta, Cyprus, Austria, Estonia, Latvia, Ireland, Germany, Belgium and Spain.
In contrast, non-nationals represented less than 1% of the population in Poland and Romania.
In most EU Member States, the majority of non-nationals were citizens of non-EU countries. Only in Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, Austria and Slovakia the non-nationals were mainly citizens of another EU Member State.
Immigration to the EU from non-member countries was 2.7 million in 2019.
A total of 4.2 million people immigrated to one of the EU Member States during 2019, while 2.7 million emigrants were reported to have left an EU Member State. However, these total figures do not represent the migration flows to/from the EU as a whole, since they also include flows between different EU Member States. In 2019, there were an estimated 2.7 million immigrants to the EU from non-EU countries and about 1.2 million people emigrated from EU to a country outside the EU. In addition, 1.4 million people previously residing in one EU Member State migrated to another Member State.
Germany reported the largest total number of immigrants (886.3 thousand) in 2019, followed by Spain (750.5 thousand), France (385.6 thousand) and Italy (332.8 thousand). Germany also reported the highest number of emigrants in 2019 (576.3 thousand), followed by France (299.1 thousand), Spain (296.2 thousand) and Romania (233.7 thousand). A total of 22 of the EU Member States reported more immigration than emigration in 2019, but in Bulgaria, Croatia, Latvia, Denmark and Romania the number of emigrants outnumbered the number of immigrants.
Relative to the size of the resident population, Malta recorded the highest rates of immigration in 2019 (56 immigrants per 1 000 persons), followed by Luxembourg (43 immigrants per 1 000 persons). For emigration, the highest rates in 2019 were reported for Luxembourg (25 emigrants per 1 000 persons), Cyprus (20 emigrants per 1 000 persons) and Malta (16 emigrants per 1 000 persons).
