Some 28,400 Romanians received citizenship from other European Union countries in 2015.

Romania thus ranks first in the EU for the number of people getting citizenship from other EU countries, according to Eurostat. Poland is second, with some 17,800 Poles becoming citizens of other EU states in 2015.

Overall, Romanians make the fifth-biggest group of recipients of EU citizenship, after Moroccans (86,100 citizenship recipients), Albanians (48,400), Turks (35,000), and Indians (31,000).

More than half of the Romanians (50.7%) who got citizenship of another EU country in 2015 were “adopted” by Italy, with Germany (10.7%) and Hungary (9.2%) coming next.

Romanians made the biggest group of citizenship recipients in Hungary, namely 64.4% of the 4,048 people who were granted this status by the neighboring country. Romanians were also the second biggest group of citizenship recipients in Belgium (4.4% of the 27,000 cases), and the third-biggest group of citizenship recipients in Italy (with 8.1% of the 178,000 cases).

Meanwhile, Romania granted citizenship to 2,611 people coming from other countries in 2015. Some 64% of them were Ukrainians, 22% came from Moldova, and 3.4% came from Turkey.

A total of 841,000 people received citizenship in the EU in 2015.

editor@romania-insider.com