A recently released report by Eurostat has revealed that 2.5% of the EU population in 2011 were originally from a different EU member state. However, non-EU citizens made up a larger percentage (4.1%) of the EU population last year.

In 2011, 33.3m foreign citizens lived in the EU27Member States, accounting for 6.6% of the EU27 population. This foreign population comprised 12.8m EU citizens living in another Member State, i.e. 2.5% of the EU27population, and 20.5m non-EU citizens.

Last year the highest proportion of foreign EU citizens still lived in Luxembourg, Cyprus, Belgium and Ireland. However in terms of numbers, the largest numbers of foreign citizens were recorded in Germany(7.2m persons or 9% of the total population), Spain(5.7m or 12%), Italy (4.6m or 8%), the UK (4.5m or 7%) and France(3.8m or 6%).

In total, more than 75% of the foreign citizens in the EU27lived in these five Member States.