A study released by the Austrian Integration Fund has revealed that as many as 20 per cent of Austria’s residents were born overseas and more than half of them come from non-EU countries.
The study, entitled “Federal States — Statistics on Migration & Integration,” showed that the majority of foreign-born residents live in the Austrian capital of Vienna with a total of 36 per cent of the city’s population being born overseas, Kronen Zeitung reports.
Turks and Serbians make up the largest migrant communities in Vienna with the district of Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus having the largest migrant population with around half of residents coming from a migrant background.
Vienna also has large populations of Syrians and Afghan nationals with 23,000 Syrian migrants and 17,600 individuals originally from Afghanistan.
The report also examined integration and found a high number of school pupils did not speak German as their primary language. Across Austria, the number who spoke another language was just over a quarter but in Vienna the rate was much higher at around 50 per cent with some schools having a proportion as high as 82.3 per cent.
Unemployment among both native Austrians and foreigners has dropped overall, but there remains a disparity between the native and migrant unemployment rates with native Austrians seeing a rate of 7.5 per cent while 12.5 per cent of foreign nationals were unemployed.
Similar statistics have been observed in Sweden where the unemployment numbers between natives and migrants are even starker. According to a report released in 2018, the native unemployment rate dropped from 3.9 to 3.6 per cent while the migrant rate remained much higher at 19.9 per cent.
In the heavily migrant-populated Swedish city of Malmö, the unemployment rate is double the Swedish average.
While the conservative-populist coalition government in Austria has managed to increase deportations of criminal migrants by 36 per cent under Freedom Party (FPÖ) Interior Minister Herbert Kickl, migrant crime rates remain high.
According to the Interior Ministry, around one in every two criminal suspects in Vienna come from migrant backgrounds.