The share of people with a migrant background in Germany rose to 21.2 million last year, representing nearly 26% of the country’s population, the Federal Statistical Office announced on Tuesday. Of these, more than one million (1.018 million) were Romanians or born of Romanian parents, according to the same source.

In Germany, a person is considered to have a migration background if they, or at least one of their parents, were born without German citizenship. Thus, the term includes both foreign citizens, foreigners with German citizenship, and German citizens with foreign parents.

The fifth-biggest group of people with migrant background in Germany has Romanian roots, after Turks (2.82 mln), Poles (2.24 mln), Russians (1.39 mln), and Kazakhs (1.24 mln), according to the official statistics.

Close to 750,000 Romanian citizens lived in Germany at the end of 2019, another official statistic shows. This number is twice the population of Iasi, the second-biggest city in Romania.

The number of Romanians living in Germany went up almost four times since the end of 2012 (from about 200,000). Only in 2019, more than 50,000 Romanians moved to Germany, representing the biggest group of new migrants for the second year in a row.

Of the 748,000 Romanians who lived in Germany at the end of 2019, 48,000 were born in the country of Romanian parents. The average age of Romanians living in Germany is 32.2 years and the largest age group is 20 to 45 (over 440,000). Over 151,000 Romanians living in Germany were under 20 years old.

Romania is known as one of the countries with the highest international migration in the world. Millions of Romanians have left the country to live and work in other EU countries in the last 20 years. Romanians represent the biggest group of migrants in Italy (over 1.2 million) and the second-biggest in the United Kingdom (600,000).

Andrei Chirileasa, andrei@romania-insider.com

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