Albanians are the second largest foreign community in Italy, with 557 thousand people.

2025-12-19 07:32:00, Sociale CNA

Albanians are the second largest foreign community in Italy, with 557 thousand

Albanians rank second after Romanians for the highest number of foreign communities living in the neighboring country, Italy.

There are 557 thousand people physically born in Albania, regardless of their citizenship, who are registered in Italy, for the year 2024. Compared to the previous year, the number of citizens born in Albania living in Italy has increased by about 20 thousand people.

The data was released by Eurostat in its publication on immigration. Those born in Albania make up 8.3% of the foreign community in Italy.

In first place are those born in Romania, who are about 900 thousand people, or 13.5% of the total.

A part of Albanian citizens born in Albania have already become Italian citizens. The other Eurostat data for persons with Albanian citizenship is 419 thousand, which shows, persons born in Albania who have not changed their citizenship, Persons born outside Albania, but with Albanian citizenship, Immigrants who live abroad and have not been naturalized in the host country. The difference between them is about 141 thousand.

Italy is the only country that, according to Eurostat, results in having Albanian citizens in the Eurostat table which gives the 5 main countries by citizenship and country of birth of the foreign population / born abroad. Meanwhile, data is missing for Greece, where there is also a large Albanian community. There is no data for Germany, France or Spain either.

Of the other countries where there is data, in Belgium there are 15.6 thousand citizens born in Albania, in Sweden around 10.4 thousand, in Austria around 7 thousand, in the Netherlands around 4 thousand, in Turkey around 3.5 thousand.

In Slovenia, Kosovo is the fourth largest community of foreigners, with around 30 thousand citizens who were born in Kosovo.

Immigrants in Europe

According to Eurostat, on 1 January 2024, 44.7 million people born outside the European Union were living in an EU country, representing 9.9% of the EU population. This number is 2.3 million higher than a year earlier.

Meanwhile, 17.9 million people living in one of the EU countries were born in another European Union country, a figure that represents an increase of 0.2 million people compared to last year.

In absolute terms, the highest number of foreign-born individuals was recorded in Germany (16.9 million), France (9.3 million), Spain (8.8 million) and Italy (6.7 million). Together, these four countries concentrated 66.6% of the total foreign-born population living in the EU, while they account for 57.8% of the total population of the European Union.

The highest relative weight of the foreign-born population to the total population was recorded in Luxembourg, where it accounted for 51.0% of the resident population, followed by Malta (30.8%), Cyprus (26.9%), Ireland (22.6%), Austria (22.1%), Sweden (20.6%) and Germany (20.2%).

In contrast, less than 5% of the population was born abroad in Poland (2.6%), Romania (3.1%), Bulgaria (3.3%) and Slovakia (3.9%)./ Monitor Magazine