The number of foreigners living in Germany has grown at its fastest rate for 20 years and now stands at a record level of 7.2 million, government figures showed yesterday.
The Central Register of Foreigners (AZR), a government body which collects data on foreigners in, said on Tuesday that the number of people in the country without a German passport rose by 282,800 between 2011 and 2012 – an increase of 4.1 percent. The year before the rise was 2.1 percent.
And 80 percent of the newly-registered foreigners came from EU member states, while the number of migrants from countries that joined the EU in 2004 rose by 15.5 percent.
The number of new immigrants from Romania and Hungary, which both joined the EU in 2007, was particularly high. Germany’s strong economy and good job opportunities have proved a major pull for Eastern European nationals.
…..Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, Greeks and Spaniards were the biggest movers from inside the EU. The remaining 20 percent of arrivals came from outside the EU – above all from Syria, China, India and Russia.
…The statistics told a different story for Turks, Germany’s largest ethnic minority. The number of Turkish people living in Germany without a German passport decreased in 2012.
Poles make up the second-largest group of foreign citizens in Germany with 532,000 citizens, followed by Italians, Greeks and Croatians.
At the end of 2012 a total of 80.52 million people were living in Germany – one in twelve without a German passport.
Read the article: http://www.thelocal.de/national/20131022-52523.html
Source: The Local Germany