Immigration to Europe

Between 2010 and 2013, around 1.4 million non-EU nationals, excluding asylum seekers and refugees, immigrated into the EU each year using regular means, with a slight decrease since 2010.

Spain was not restricted for the 2007 enlargement of the European Union, when 9 countries entered Schengen area in 2007, and received many Romanians and Bulgarians as well other citizens of the new EU states.

the intention of restricting free movement of EU nationals (contrary to Treaty obligations and the clear jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice).

Citizens from the European Union make up a growing proportion of immigrants in Portugal, Spain, South of France, Italy and Greece [21][22][23][24][25][26][27] In 2023 and 2024, 3 new countries entered the Schengen area, including Romania and Bulgaria.

[quantify] Increasing globalization has brought a population of students, professionals, and workers from all over the world into major European cities, most notably London, Paris, and Frankfurt.

However, the EU-Turkey deal enacted in March 2016 dramatically reduced this number, and anti-immigrant measures starting in 2017 by the Italian government further cut illegal immigration from the Mediterranean route.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen praised the EU Asylum and Migration Pact as a "huge achievement for Europe".

Among the 5.3 million foreign-born immigrants, 38% are from Europe, 30% from Maghreb, 12.5% from Sub-Saharan Africa, 14.2% from Asia and 5.3% from America and Oceania[64][65] The most significant countries of origin as of 2008 were Algeria (713,000), Morocco (653,000), Portugal (580,000), Italy (317,000), Spain (257,000), Turkey (238,000) and Tunisia (234,000).

However, immigration from Asia (especially China, as well as the former French colonies of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos), and from Sub-Saharan Africa (Senegal, Mali and others), is gaining in importance.

[74] On 14 September 2024, Scholz and Kenyan President William Ruto signed an agreement that opened the German labor market to up to 250,000 skilled and semi-skilled migrant workers from Kenya.

[83] The number of African students increases rapidly for Example only Nigerians studying in the United Kingdom has risen to a high of 44,195 in the 2021/2022 academic year, the latest official data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) show.

These figures include naturalized foreign-born residents (about 1,620,000 foreigners acquired Italian citizenship from 1999 to 2020, of whom 130,000 did so in 2020[87]) as well as illegal immigrants, the so-called clandestini, whose numbers, difficult to determine, are thought to be at least 670,000.

[92][93] After the fall of the Berlin Wall and, more recently, the 2004 and 2007 enlargements of the European Union, large waves of migration originated from the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe (especially Romania, Albania, Ukraine, Moldova and Poland).

Another source of immigration is neighbouring North Africa (in particular, Morocco, Egypt and Tunisia), with soaring arrivals as a consequence of the Arab Spring.

Furthermore, in recent years, growing migration fluxes from Asia-Pacific (notably China,[94] South Asia, and the Philippines) and Latin America have been recorded.

As of 2022, legal immigrants represented about 7% of the population, and the largest communities were from Brazil, the United Kingdom, Cape Verde, India, Italy, Angola, France, and Ukraine.

At the end of March 2002 when data on the country of birth for total population were for the first and last time collected by a conventional (field) census, the number was almost 170,000 (8.6%).

[126] Since the years 1970s–1980s, the European continent has been increasingly targeted by waves of unauthorized immigrants from Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and other regions of the world, primarily affecting the countries of Southern Europe (such as Spain, Italy, Greece, and Malta).

[131] On August 14, 2020, the Ministry of Immigration and Integration in Denmark revealed that it denied 83 people Danish citizenship in the past two years because they have committed serious crimes.

[139] Four violent crimes committed during the week of 18 July 2016, three of them by asylum seekers, created significant political pressure for changes in the Angela Merkel administration policy of welcoming refugees.

[144][145] In March 2020, migrants set fires and threw Molotov cocktail firebombs over to the Greek side in order to break down the border fence.

[173] According to an October 2024 survey for the El País newspaper and Cadena SER radio station, 57% of Spaniards believe there is "too much" immigration to Spain.

Anti-immigration sentiment in the United Kingdom has historically focused on non-indigenous African, Afro-Caribbean and especially South Asian migrants, all of whom began to arrive from the Commonwealth of Nations in greater numbers following World War II.

While working-class migrants tend to be the focus of anti-immigration sentiment, there is also some discontent about Russian, Chinese, Singaporean and Gulf Arab multimillionaires resident in the UK, particularly in London and South East England.

These residents often invest in property and business, and are perceived as living extravagant "jet-set" lifestyles marked by conspicuous consumption while simultaneously taking advantage of tax loopholes connected to non-dom status.

This is a list of European countries by immigrant population, based on the United Nations report Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2013 Revision.

Countries in which immigrants form between 25% and 10% of the population are: Switzerland (23%), Latvia (19%), Estonia (15%), Austria (15%), Croatia (15%), Ukraine (14.7%), Cyprus (14.3%), Ireland (14%), Moldova (13%), Germany (12.3%), Sweden (12.3%), Belarus (12%), Slovenia (11.1%), Spain (10.8%, 12.2% in 2010), France (10.2%), and the Netherlands (10%).

[187] The United Kingdom (9%), Greece (8.6%), Russia (8.5%), Finland (8.1%), Iceland (7.6%), Norway (7.4%), Portugal (7.2%), Denmark (7.1%), Belgium (6.9%) and the Czech Republic (6.7%),[188] each have a proportion of immigrants between 10% and 5% of the total population.

Shares below one-tenth were observed in a further four EU Member States (Hungary, Czechia, Lithuania and Greece) and between 10.0% and 15.0% in another four (Finland, Portugal, Denmark and Italy).

Le migrazioni del nostro tempo pongono con forza una "domanda di accoglienza" (v. Ponzio 1993), cioe' una domanda non contenibile nel mercato e nell'"integrazione", che evidenzia, anche inconsapevolmente, le divaricazioni crescenti sul nostro pianeta tra poverta' e ricchezza.La "vulgata" difunde la idea de que el fenomeno es de dimensiones incontrolables e indefinibles, y se llega a formular la afirmacion comun de que hay tantos, o mas, extranjeros clandestinos como extranjeros visibles y regulares.