According to the dialectic principle, Romanians’ migration went to the next level and opened an even worse stage for the labour market in the country:
After the UK, another European country announces the registration of some spectacular flows of Romanians, much higher than those to traditional destinations, Italy and Spain, where Romanians have already formed the largest communities of foreign citizens.
Net migration to Germany, meaning the difference between people with other citizenship who came and those who left, was 416,000 last year, the Federal Office of Statistics (Destatis) announced.
Of this total, the largest group of newly arrived is formed by Romanians (73,000), and not Syrians (whose number declined from 146,000 in 2016 to 60,000 newly arrived in 2017).
Approximately 220,000 Romanians came to Germany in 2017 and nearly 152,000 left. The difference, of 73,000, is last year’s net Romanian migration to Germany.
Poland, with 34,000 new emigrants, Croatia (33,000) and Bulgaria (with 30,000 people) are the next countries in the ranking.
Romanians defy Brexit
Germany’s announcement comes after the UK announced this year that Romanians from the island reached the second position in 2017, after Poles, in the ranking of residents of another nationality.
Approximately 411,000 Romanians lived last year in the island, compared to over one million Poles and only 350,000 Irish and 346,000 Indians (the last two groups rank third and fourth).
Romanians’ net migration set a new record in 2017 – 83,000 people (the number of Romanians who arrived for more than 12 months exceeded by 83,000 the number of Romanians who left this country).
The island became the main target of Romanian emigrants as early as 2015 (only one year after the opening of the labour market for us and Bulgarians), when 54,412 people left there (net migration) compared to 44,209 Romanians who chose Italy.
All these trends reflect changes in the structure of the emigrant population – there are more skilled people with sought-after specialisations compared to the flows of those who left to work abroad immediately after the EU accession.
The community in Spain is decreasing, the number of those who left in 2017 to Italy – by more than 60% below 2016
For comparison, the trend to one of the countries preferred 10 years ago, Spain, is decreasing – the Romanian community decreased, at July 1, 2017, to 679,682 (from a maximum level of over 800,000 people, which has been registered even since the census in 2011), according to the Spanish National Institute of Statistics.
Moroccans (669,629 people, on July 1, 2017) will soon become the largest group in Spain, the same as before Romania became the main pool of immigrants from Eastern Europe.
In Italy, the community is not decreasing, but the arrivals are much lower than those in the previous years.
The number of Romanians newly established there for more than 12 months was over 90,000 and the flow of emigrants reduced to 44,000 people in 2016. Since then, the Romanian community from Italy has increased by only 17,157, according to the Rome Institute of Statistics. In total, almost 1.2 million Romanians live in Italy and many of them have dual citizenship.
