Some 29 million people, or 6.4% of the 449.3 million living in the European Union on 1 January 2024, were non-EU citizens, according to the latest data published by Eurostat, the EU statistical office.

A further 14 million were EU nationals living in an EU country other than their own, Eurostat said in a new analysis of population figures.

In the Netherlands, 1,523,900 people, or 8.5% of the total population, were non-nationals, of whom 745,500 held the nationality of another EU member state and 773,600 a non-EU nationality, the Eurostat data shows.

Ukrainian, Turkish and Moroccan citizens were the three largest groups of non-EU citizens living in the EU, while Romanians, Poles and Italians were the most populous groups of EU citizens living in another EU country.

In the Netherlands, the largest foreign communities were Polish, Ukrainian, Turkish, German and Syrian.

Of the total Dutch population 2,914,900 residents, or 16%, were born in another country, of whom 2,135,300 (11.7%) came from outside the EU and 779,600 were from another EU member state (4.3%).

The right-wing Dutch government has made curbing immigration a central part of its strategy, and that includes a wish to impose limits on the number of people coming to the Netherlands to work, including EU nationals.

Economists have also called for a shift in economic strategy to ensure the Netherlands becomes less reliant on cheap, low-skilled labour from abroad.

Outside the EU

Across the bloc, the majority of non-nationals were born outside the EU. Only in Luxembourg, Hungary and Slovakia the share was higher for people born in another EU member state.

Germany (16.9 million), France (9.3 million), Spain (8.8 million) and Italy (6.7 million) have the largest foreign-born populations but the highest percentage was recorded in Luxembourg (51%), Malta (30.8%), Cyprus (26.9%), Ireland (22.6%) and Austria (22.1%).

By contrast, foreign-born people represented less than 5% of the population in Poland (2.6%), Romania (3.1%), Bulgaria (3.3%) and Slovakia (3.9%).

Over the past ten years, the proportion of foreign-born persons increased in most EU countries, except for Latvia and Greece.

The age factor

In the Netherlands, children make up 16.7% of the native population but only 6.8% of those who were born abroad.

The data generally includes refugees who have been resident for at least 12 months, but unlike the Netherlands, some countries do not include asylum seekers and Ukrainian refugees who benefit from temporary protection in the EU in the statistics.