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Since 2002, about 330,000 Albanians living abroad have obtained the citizenship of a member country of the European Union, including UK.
Greece and Italy are the two countries that have given the highest number of citizenship to Albanian emigrants. Since 2002 about 150,000 Albanians have been granted Greek citizenship and about 148,000 have been granted Italian citizenship. The Albanian community is the second in Italy in terms of number. Data published by Eurostat and processed by Monitor show that in 2017 in Italy were about 448 thousand Albanians, while data on the number of Albanians living and working in Greece are not reported.The third country is the United Kingdom, where about 11,000 Albanians have been aquired the citizenship since 2002.
German citizenship is taken by 5700 Albanians. Data from Eurostat show that in 2017 the number of Albanians living there was almost halved, from 74 thousand to 49 thousand. Most of them were asylum seekers who were denied asylum applications and were repatriated to Albania. Since 2011, in Germany, 90,000 Albanians have applied for asylum, but most of them have received negative answers.
Then the number of citizenship issued for Albanians was Belgium with 5000 applications.
France issued about 3400 citizenship for this period. There is no data reported by France on the number of Albanians currently living there, but recently there has been a boom of asylum applications by Albanians, ranking in the three main countries of origin. Since 2011, about 40,000 Albanians have applied for asylum in France.
In Sweden and Austria, respectively about one thousands of citizenships were issued for Albanian.
In total there are about 1.6 million individuals living outside the territory of Albania, according to Diaspora data, a new publication of INSTAT. Of these 825 thousand individuals (almost 53%) are males and 755.6 thousand are females.