These are flows, not stocks.
Immigrants and emigrants are people crossing the border in a given year; they are not comparable with, and are never charted against, the
census enumerated population or the annual de jure population, which count usual residents at a moment in time. Adding a year of migration flows to a population stock does not reproduce the next year’s stock — CYSTAT revises both series independently and neither is derived from the other on this site.
Immigration vs. foreign-citizen stock. The figures on the immigration page count people crossing the border in a given year (a flow) or people counted at the 2021 Census (one moment). Neither is an annual count of how many foreign citizens live in Cyprus in other years.
Net migration is published directly by CYSTAT, not computed by Humanity Observatory from the immigration and emigration series — it carries no calculated marker for that reason, even though it happens to equal immigrants minus emigrants in most years.
Previous and next residence are coarse EU/non-EU categorisations, not individual countries, and use two different published schemes — merging them, or treating either as equivalent to citizenship or country of birth, would misrepresent what CYSTAT measured. Citizenship at the 2021 Census includes people who declared Cypriot citizenship as a second citizenship, per CYSTAT’s own footnote, and is never the same measurement as country of birth. The 2021 Census is a single moment; the annual immigrant flow carries no country breakdown before 2018 and only the EU/non-EU previous-residence split after.
How the citizenship/birth/previous-residence numbers are built. Citizenship, country-of-birth and previous-residence breakdowns are three independent, published views of the same people — each sums back to the published total on its own, and none of them are added to each other or to one another’s total.
Data years differ by section. Annual flows run 1981-2024; the citizenship, birth and previous-residence partitions of the immigrant flow run 2018-2024 only; the citizenship-by-country breakdown is a single 2021 Census moment. A figure from one range is never charted against a figure from another as though they were the same series.
Emigration is under-counted
Emigration is a generally under-recorded flow in EU population registers, Cyprus included: someone who leaves without notifying the authorities is not counted as an emigrant. Treat the emigration and net-migration series as a floor on how many people actually left, not a precise count.
No annual per-country citizenship or foreign-population series exists yet for Cyprus. No ethnicity, religion or residence-status data appears anywhere in this family of pages.
The migratory map’s four measures (from the interactive migratory map) are four distinct legal and statistical concepts that are never conflated or summed: (1) valid residence permits (Eurostat migr_resvalid) — an annual stock, 2008-2025, of permits held by third-country nationals only; EU citizens exercise freedom of movement without a residence permit and are structurally absent from this measure, which counts instruments, not unique persons; (2) asylum applications (Eurostat migr_asyappctza) — an annual flow of applicants, not of granted protection or total resident population; (3) census foreign citizens (CYSTAT 2021) — the enumerated resident population on 1 October 2021 by legal citizenship, including both EU and third-country citizens, a single reference moment; (4) census foreign-born (CYSTAT 2021) — the same 2021 moment by country of birth, not identical to citizenship: it includes Cypriot citizens born abroad and foreign citizens born in third countries.
On the map, centroids indicate sovereign origin, not departure point: lines and arcs connect the geographic centroid of the origin country to Cyprus and never represent transit routes, flights or maritime paths. A valid permit confirms legal third-country residence authorisation under national or EU rules — it does not measure unauthorised residence or naturalised citizens.