Poland Issued Most EU Residence Permits for the Fifth Consecutive Year
According to data from Eurostat, the European Office of Statistics, Poland issued 967,345 permits in 2021, recording the highest annual figure ever. This represented one-third of all permits issued in the EU and more than twice as many as other European states, AtoZSerwisPlus.com reports.
Other countries with high rates of residence permits were Spain (371,778), France (285,190), and Germany (185,213). In ratio to the population, Poland issued the second most permits – 25.6 per 1,000 population, following Malta with 27.7 permits issued per 1,000 and Cyprus was listed third, with 24.6 per 1,000.
In addition, the number of residence permits has returned to pre-pandemic levels as 2.9 million were issued across the bloc – 31 per cent more than in 2020 and about 3,000 less than those recorded in 2019.
Poland, too, experienced a considerable increase in the number of permits issued in 2021 – increasing by 62 per cent from under 600,000 recorded in the previous year. In 2019, the country’s highest yearly figure was almost 725,000.
Since 2017, Poland has issued the most first-residence permits in Europe, while in the three years before that, the country was listed second after the United Kingdom, which left the EU in 2020.
As per the reasons for issuing permits in 2021, those varied for Poland from other high-immigration countries, as 82 per cent were for employment, while these rates stood at 24 per cent in Spain, 13 per cent in France and ten per cent in Germany.
The main countries of origin of residence permit beneficiaries were Ukraine, with 75.5 per cent of the permits issued in 2021 going to citizens of Ukraine, followed by Belarus (13.5 per cent), Russia (2.4 per cent), Turkey (one per cent) and India (0.8 per cent).
According to another study from Eurostat, Ukrainians were the nationality group to receive the highest number of first residence permits in 2021, with 83 per cent of those being issued by the Polish government alone.
Immigrants from Morocco and Belarus followed the list with 150,100, and 149,000 first-residence received, respectively, while the issuing countries for these two nationality groups were Spain and Poland.
