Education is main reason of immigration to Romania

Recent data by Eurostat shows that the largest share of immigrants choosing Romania as their destination in 2014 stated education as the reason for relocation. Over 34 percent of people asking for a residence permit in our country came here for education, while 32.4 percent invoked family reasons.

A smaller share (17.5 percent) of immigrants came to Romania for employment, while other reasons were invoked by 15.8 percent.

Romania issued 10,294 residence permits during 2014, about 0.5 per 1,000 average population, while the EU average stood at 4.5. In fact, Romania scored lowest among EU states in terms of permits issued, just below Croatia, with 0.8 permits per 1,000 population and Slovakia with 1.

Among countries who had the highest immigrant intake compared to average of population Malta takes the lead with 23.2, followed by Liechtenstein with 19 and Cyprus with 16.2.

Countries with the highest intake of immigrants calculated as share of total immigrants coming to EU were the United Kingdom (567,800 residence permits issued, or 24.6 percent of total permits issued in the EU), followed at a distance by Poland (355,400, or 15.4 percent), Germany (237,600, or 10.3 percent), France (218,300, or 9.5 percent), Italy (204,300, or 8.9 percent) and Spain (188,600, or 8.2 percent). Together, these six member states accounted for around three quarters of all first residence permits issued in the EU in 2014, the report shows.

In 2014, citizens of Ukraine (302,800 beneficiaries, or 13.1 percent of the total number of new residence permits issued in the EU) continued to receive the highest number of permits, ahead of citizens of the United States (199,200, or 8.6 percent), China (169,700, or 7.4 percent) and India (134,900, or 5.8 percent). A third of all new residence permits issued in the EU in 2014 were issued to citizens of these four countries.

In Romania, 13.6 percent of residence beneficiaries (1,401) came from the Republic of Moldova, 11 percent (1,129) from Turkey and 9.5 percent (980) from China.