# The cities gaining migrants are not the cities that are growing

> Where are foreign populations growing fastest? Across 423 cities, growth is almost unrelated to whether the city is growing at all: 0.11 pooled, near zero by country.

Published 2026-08-04 · Maksim Streltcov · https://immigrationdb.com/research/where-people-actually-move/

Question: where are foreign populations actually growing, and does that growth follow the cities that are growing overall? Answer: growth is widespread, and it is almost unrelated to whether a city is growing at all. Across 423 cities with at least a decade of official figures , 394 saw their foreign population rise and 29 saw it fall. But the correlation between foreign-population growth and total-population growth is only 0.11 — and inside every country large enough to measure separately, it is near zero or slightly negative: −0.01 in Germany , −0.05 in France , −0.08 in Italy , −0.16 in Spain . That is the finding. Shrinking cities are not being skipped. In Spain the relationship leans the other way: cities losing residents overall have been gaining foreign residents at least as fast as the ones that are growing.

## What we measured
## What the data shows
## Where it breaks down
## What this means if you are moving
## Limits
## Method
## Sources

## Questions

**Where is the foreign population growing fastest?**

Among 423 cities with at least a decade of official figures, Vilnius leads at 15.6% a year, from 7,311 foreign residents in 2011 to 48,333 in 2024. Portuguese and Bulgarian cities fill most of the rest of the top ten. These are compound annual rates for a resident stock, not counts of arrivals.

**Does a growing foreign population mean the city is growing?**

Almost not at all. Pooled across 423 cities the Spearman correlation between foreign-population growth and total-population growth is 0.11, and inside the four countries large enough to report it is near zero or slightly negative: −0.01 in Germany, −0.05 in France, −0.08 in Italy and −0.16 in Spain. A city can be shrinking overall and still be a destination.

**Why did foreign population fall in Rīga and Narva?**

Foreign population is a stock, not a flow. In Latvia and Estonia it includes a large post-Soviet non-citizen population that shrinks through naturalisation, ageing and emigration. Rīga falls 61% between 2000 and 2025 and Narva 40% between 2011 and 2026 without anyone necessarily leaving on the naturalisation part.

**Can these numbers be compared between countries?**

No. Each statistical office defines "foreign" its own way — non-citizen in one country, foreign-born or migration background in another. Compare a city with its own past, and cities within one country with each other. This article never ranks countries against each other by level.

**Why were 94 cities excluded?**

Their published series break mid-way. All 42 Dutch cities switch from a Eurostat citizenship count to a national migration-background count, which multiplies the last value roughly fourfold; 39 of them also carry a corrupt 2023 point three to five times its neighbours. Measuring growth across that break would have reported a definition change as migration.