Where do foreign citizens live in the EU?

The Romanian Press Agency article has an eye-catching article, "Romania leads top emigration countries in EU".

The largest groups came from Romania with 1.7million emigrants, namely 15% of total number of foreign citizens from another EU Member State. Romania is followed by Italy with 1.3 million emigrants or 11%, and Poland with 1.2 million citizens or 11%. Among the citizens of countries outside the European Union, the largest groups were from Turkey (2.4 million), Morocco (1.7 million), and Albania (1 million). According to Eurostat, the highest percentage of Romanian citizens in the population was found in Spain (734,800), Italy (625,300) and Hungary (65,000).

This is the Eurostat press release that the article refers to. Some of the patterns revealed are quite interesting, for instance the distribution of the foreign-born--while biased towards the large EU countries in absolute numbers--follows certain traces.

In 2008, the largest numbers of foreign citizens were recorded in Germany (7.3 million persons), Spain (5.3 million), the United Kingdom (4.0 million), France (3.7 million) and Italy (3.4 million). More than 75% of the foreign citizens in the EU27 lived in these Member States.

Among the EU27 Member States, the highest percentage of foreign citizens in the population was found in Luxembourg (43% of the total population), followed by Latvia (18%), Estonia (17%), Cyprus (16%), Ireland (13%), Spain (12%) and Austria (10%). The percentage of foreign citizens was less than 1% in Romania, Poland, Bulgaria and Slovakia.

In a detailed breakdown of the top three foreign nationalities in all but three European Union member-states, the report shows the consequences of historic migrations, like the Soviet-era flows to Latvia and Lithuania, the historically massive Italian flows to France and Belgium and the Portuguese movements to France and Switzerland and Luxembourg, the domination of migration to Portugal by Lusophones and migration to Finland from its neighbouring countries, down to the most recent movements like that of Ukrainians to the Czech Republic and Albanians to Greece and, of course, the Romanians to Spain and Portugal.

Some of the statistics are likely off, mind, not indicating the size of the migrations owing to the naturalization of the immigrants and the assimilation of their second- and third-generation descendants, and the extent to which this is even possible. In a Romania with relatively few foreign citizens present, "the largest group of foreign citizens came from Moldova (5,500), Turkey (2,200) and China (1,900)," but exceptionally liberal citizenship policy for Moldovans based on Romanian policy that Moldovans are Romanians, too, with upwards of a million applicants.