Nearly 1 in 10 people in Flanders has a foreign nationality | Inland

At the beginning of this year, Flanders had just over 658,000 people with a foreign nationality, or 9.8 percent of the total population. In 2000 it was almost 5 percent. At about ten percent, the Flemish share is slightly higher than the European average of eight percent.

The share of people with a foreign nationality is highest in the periphery around Brussels, in the major cities of Antwerp and Ghent and in the border region with the Netherlands in the provinces of Antwerp and Limburg. The city centers also score relatively high. Furthermore, nationality varies greatly from region to region.

The number of people of foreign origin is then somewhat higher. At the beginning of this year, for example, there were 1,677,000 persons of foreign origin in Flanders, or a quarter of the total population.

This concerns persons with a current foreign nationality, but also persons with a current Belgian nationality but with a foreign nationality of birth or with at least 1 parent with a foreign nationality of birth.

Here too, the Netherlands is the largest country of origin, followed by people of Moroccan, Turkish, Italian and Romanian origin.

Furthermore, almost half of the persons with a foreign origin were born in Belgium, but this proportion differs between origin groups. For example, these figures are higher for people of Turkish, Maghrebian and Southern European origin. This is due to the difference in timing of the main migration flows.