One in five Bavarians has foreign roots

Just over 2.3 million of Bavaria's inhabitants either owned a foreign passport, or their parents had moved to Germany after 1955, according to analyses taken from the German census in 2011 and published on Monday by the Bavarian Statistics Office.

Almost 60 percent of this group were categorized as "German with immigrant background," while the rest had foreign citizenship.

Among these were counted so-called "Spätaussiedler", some of whom came to claim their long-held right to German citizenship after the fall of the former Soviet Union, mainly from Poland, Romania, Kazakhstan and Russia.

Overall, two thirds of this group had emigrated to Germany and Bavaria themselves, while over 35 percent had been born there to immigrant parents.

Meanwhile, those with non-German passports were mostly from Turkey or Bavaria's neighbouring countries such as Austria and Italy.

In total, two thirds of Bavarian residents with non-German backgrounds had roots in European countries, with Asian countries counting among the next most common background.

One in four of these people had moved to Bavaria or been born there over the past ten years – 71 percent of them were still under 30 when the census was taken in 2011.

Forty-three percent, meanwhile, had been in Germany for more than 20 years, the figures showed.

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