Estonia ranks third in the European Union in its proportion of foreign citizens, according to a study published last week by the EU’s statistical agency Eurostat to mark International Migrants Day. Foreign citizens comprise approximately 17% of Estonia’s population, placing Estonia third behind Luxembourg (43%) and Latvia (18%).
At the bottom of the rankings is Romania, with foreign citizens representing just 0.1% of its population.
Who are Estonia’s foreign citizens? The Eurostat study is silent on this question, with a footnote that detailed data on Estonia is unavailable. But some insight can be gained by looking at the data for neighbor Latvia. According to Eurostat, most (89.5%) of Latvia’s foreign citizens are classified as recognized non-citizens, a category defined as:
… [A] person who is neither a citizen of the reporting country nor of any other country, but who has established links to that country which includes some but not all rights and obligations of full citizenship.
One can reasonably assume that a similar proportion of Estonia’s foreign citizens is made up of recognized non-citizens. And just who are these RNCs? According to 2000 census figures, 25.6% of Estonia’s population is ethnically Russian, with another 2.1% Ukrainian and 1.3% Belarusian.
Would you be surprised to learn that the majority of foreign-citizenship leader Luxembourg’s foreign citizens are Portuguese? The complete study is here.
Estonia scored highly in a recent survey of linguistic skills across the European Union. Among the 29 countries surveyed (the EU 27 plus Croatia and Norway), Estonia placed 6th in the percentage of the population speaking two or more foreign languages, and 7th in the proportion of secondary students who study two or more foreign languages.