TIRANA, Dec. 26 – A recent local media study revealed that from 2002, around 330,000 Albanians living abroad have obtained the citizenship of a European Union member state.
Greece and Italy are the two countries that have given the highest number of citizenship to Albanian emigrants.
Starting 2002 about 150,000 Albanians have been granted Greek citizenship and about 148,000 have been granted Italian citizenship. The Albanian community comes second in Italy in terms of size.
Data published by Eurostat and processed by the Monitor media showed that about 448 thousand Albanians lived in Italy in 2017, while data on the number of Albanians living and working in Greece are not reported.
The United Kingdom comes third in terms of granted citizenships, issuing around 11,000 of them since 2002.
Around 5,700 Albanians have been granted German citizenship. Eurostat data show that in 2017 the number of Albanians living there was halved from 74 thousand to 49 thousand. Most of them were asylum seekers who were denied asylum applications and were repatriated to Albania.
90,000 Albanians have applied for asylum in Germany since 2011, but most of them have received negative answers. Belgium follows Germany in terms of issued citizenships, with 50,000 applications.
France issued about 3400 citizenship for this period, however there is no data reported by France on the number of Albanians currently living there. Recently there has been a boom of asylum applications by Albanians, ranking Albania in the three main countries of origin.
Sweden and Austria respectively have issued around thousand citizenships for Albanian citizens.
In total there are about 1.6 million Albanians living outside the country’s territory, according to Diaspora data, a new INSTAT publication. Of these 825 thousand individuals (almost 53%) are males and 755.6 thousand are females.
