BERLIN, April 12. (Xinhua) -- The number of foreign citizens living in Germany has reached a new record high, official figures published on Thursday by the Federal Statistical Office showed.
According to the official study, there were around 10.6 million individuals with foreign citizenship living in Germany at the end of 2017.
"This is a record," a statement by Wiesbaden-based government statisticians noted.
The figures were based on data from German government's central registry for foreigners.
The number of foreign citizens rose by 585,000 individuals or 5.8 percent from 2016 to 2017, marking a significant increase compared to an average annual increase of 388,000 individuals throughout the course of the past ten years.
The Office mainly attributed a long-standing rise in the number of foreign citizens from other European Union (EU) member states, and in particular from Eastern European nations like Poland, Bulgaria and Romania, which joined the bloc in 2004 and subsequently gained the right of free movement of people from Germany in 2007.
"The German foreign population holding the citizenship of a new EU member state grew from 919,000 to 2.6 million between 2007 and 2017", a statement by the Federal Statistical Office highlighted.
By contrast, growth in the number of foreigners from non-EU countries, so-called Third Country Nationals (TCNs), fell dramatically from 665,000 individuals in 2016 to 163,000 in 2017. The trend reflects a gradual easing of the "refugee crisis" which witnessed the arrival of over one million asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan in Germany after 2015.
Separate official figures published on Thursday by the Germany interior ministry further showed that the number of new asylum seekers had fallen again by 24.8 percent in March 2018 compared to the same period last year.
Around 40,000 asylum seekers were newly-registered by German authorities in the first three months of 2018, marking an annual decrease of 15.6 percent.
