Close to 58 000 foreigners live in Bulgaria – Eurostat
The number of foreigners living in Bulgaria is about 57 965, making up about 0.8 per cent of the country’s population as at January 2014, according to figures released by European Union statistics agency Eurostat on December 18 2015.
Of the 0.8 per cent, citizens of another EU member state make up 0.2 per cent and non-EU citizens 0.6 per cent, Eurostat said.
The largest single group of foreigners resident in Bulgaria are Russians – 15 321, or 28 per cent of foreigners.
Next most numerous are citizens of Turkey (7229, or 13 per cent), Ukraine (3582, or six per cent), the United Kingdom (3495, or about six per cent) and Greece (2315, or four per cent), according to Eurostat.
Overall in the EU, foreign citizens accounted for fewer than seven per cent of people living in the EU member states in 2014, Eurostat said.
On January 1 2014, the EU member states had 506.8 million residents, of which 472.8 million were nationals (citizens of the reporting country) and 34.1 million foreign citizens, this latter group consisting of 14.3 million citizens of another EU member state and 19.8 million non-EU citizens.
Eurostat said that people who acquire citizenship in a member state are no longer counted as foreign citizens in that country.
Across all EU countries, the highest proportion of foreign citizens in the total resident population was recorded in Luxembourg (45.3 per cent), where almost half of the population did not have Luxembourgish citizenship.
Shares above 10 per cent were also registered in Cyprus (19.5 per cent), Latvia (15.2 per cent), Estonia (14.9 per cent), Austria (12.5 per cent), Ireland (11.8 per cent), Belgium (11.3 per cent) and Spain (10.1 per cent).
In contrast, Poland (0.3 per cent), Romania (0.4 per cent), Croatia, Lithuania and Bulgaria (all 0.8 per cent) all registered shares of foreign citizens below one per per cent.
In total, foreign citizens made up 6.7 per cent of the resident population of the EU member states at January 1 2014.
In 13 EU countries, there were clearly more non-EU citizens than EU citizens in the foreign population, while in 10 the situation was more balanced, with between 40 per cent and 60 per cent of both non-EU and EU citizens, Eurostat said.
Belgium, Ireland, Cyprus, Luxembourg and Slovakia were the only five EU countries where there were clearly fewer citizens of non-EU countries than citizens of another member state.
Overall in the EU, non-EU citizens (19.8 million people) represented 58 per cent of the total foreign population, while citizens of another EU member state (14.3 million people) made up 42 per cent.
For EU citizens residing in another member state, Polish citizens were registered among the five main citizenships of foreigners in 10 member states, Germans in nine and Italians and Romanians in eight each.
For non-EU citizens, Ukrainians were among the five main citizenships of foreigners in nine EU countries, and Turks and Russians in seven each, Eurostat said.
