EUROPE: Cyprus recorded third highest rate of immigration in EU

Relative to the size of its population Cyprus recorded the EU’s third highest rate of immigration in 2017, according to the latest European data.

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According to the size of the resident population, Malta recorded the highest rates of immigration in 2017 (46 immigrants per 1000 inhabitants), followed by Luxembourg (41 immigrants per 1000 inhabitants) and Cyprus with (25 per 1000).

A total of 4.4 million people immigrated to one of the European Union Member States during 2017, while at least 3.1 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.

There were an estimated 2.4 million immigrants to the EU-28 from non-EU countries. In addition, 1.9 million people previously residing in one EU Member State migrated to another Member State.

Among these 4.4 million immigrants during 2017, there were an estimated 2 million citizens of non-EU countries, 1.3 million people with citizenship of a different EU Member State from the one to which they immigrated, around 1 million people who migrated to an EU Member State of which they had the citizenship, and some 11,000 stateless people.

A total of 22 of the 28 EU Member States reported more immigration than emigration, but in Bulgaria, Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania the number of emigrants outnumbered the number of immigrants.

For emigration, the highest rates in 2017 were reported for Luxembourg (23 emigrants per 1000 inhabitants), Cyprus (18 emigrants per 1000), Lithuania (17 emigrants per 1000), and Malta (15 emigrants per 1000).

On 1 January 2018, Belgium, Ireland, Cyprus, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Austria, Romania, Slovakia and the United Kingdom were the only EU Member States where non-nationals were mainly citizens of another Member State.