“A brief note on the gap between demographic reality and perception.”

Sometimes it appears in the middle of a conversation, sometimes under the comments of a news article, sometimes as a half-heard sentence on the метро: Europe is full. It is rarely spoken like a statistic. It arrives more like a shorthand for a feeling. Fatigue, pressure, unease, sometimes even an unnameable sense of loss. That is why it is powerful. Because a feeling presents itself as lived reality. But lived reality is not always the same thing as measurement.

What I want to do in this issue is simple: place the feeling next to the numbers, without dismissing it. Not to declare one superior to the other, but to let them sit at the same table.

According to Eurostat, on 1 January 2025 the EU population was 450.6 million. Of this population, 46.7 million were born outside the EU, which corresponds to 10.4 percent. On the same date, 18.0 million people living in an EU country were born in another EU country, which corresponds to 4.0 percent. If we look at citizenship, non-EU citizens living in the EU numbered 30.6 million, or 6.8 percent. And this is not only a snapshot but also a trend: the number of people born outside the EU increased by 1.9 million compared to the previous year (Eurostat, 2025). Eurostat also notes that among non-EU citizens living in the EU, the three largest groups are citizens of Ukraine, Türkiye, and Morocco (Eurostat, 2025).

I know these figures do not explain everything on their own. Because Europe is not a single country, nor a single experience. The distribution is highly uneven. Eurostat shows that in absolute numbers, the largest foreign-born populations are in Germany (17.2 million), France (9.6 million), Spain (9.5 million), and Italy (6.9 million). These four countries host roughly two-thirds of the foreign-born population in the EU. In relative terms, the picture becomes even more striking: in Luxembourg, 51.5 percent of the population is foreign-born; in Malta, 32.0 percent; in Cyprus, 27.6 percent. By contrast, in countries such as Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovakia, the share of the foreign-born population is below 5 percent (Eurostat, 2025).

So the feeling that Europe is full is not always a judgment about Europe as a whole. It can also be the generalization of experiences that concentrate in particular countries, particular cities, and particular service systems.

Now to the core question: if the baseline is so clear, why do many people believe the migrant share is higher?

This is not unique to Europe. It is a remarkably stable pattern. Ipsos’s Perils of Perception reports have shown for years that people systematically misestimate the demographic composition of their societies. In estimates of the migrant share, the pattern is similar: perception often sits above reality (Ipsos, 2024). Our World in Data visualizes this using Ipsos data and highlights a widespread tendency to overestimate across countries (Our World in Data, 2024).

There is also a particularly clean European illustration. In a 2018 Eurobarometer summary, the Council of the European Union reported that EU citizens estimated the share of non-EU migrants in the population at 16.7 percent on average, while the actual share was 7.2 percent (Council of the European Union, 2018). The data are not new, but the perception-reality gap it captures is still very telling.

Here is the knot: even if the number stays stable, the story can grow.

Because we do not do demographic accounting in daily life. We build our sense of reality from what we see and from the stories repeated around us. When certain groups are more visible, or when visibility is coded through certain markers, boundaries start to matter more than proportions. Language, accent, skin tone, religious practice, clothing can function not merely as differences but as signals that the outside has entered the inside. In that moment, people are not estimating a share. They are registering a category. And registering categories often operates faster than counting.

There is also a time component. Eurostat’s age-structure data indicate that the foreign-born population is, on average, younger than the native-born population in the EU. On 1 January 2025, the median age of native-born people in the EU was 45.2, while the median age of the foreign-born population was 43.1 (Eurostat, 2025). This difference may look small on paper, but together with a stronger concentration in working ages, it can increase visibility in everyday life.

All of this suggests that Europe is full is not always a demographic claim. It may be naming something else: a sense of pressure, a feeling of competition over resources, a perception of strained public services, or, deeper still, fractures in recognition and belonging. When migration debates intensify through crisis language, migration can become the easiest explanation for many everyday problems: housing, healthcare, wages, security. In such an environment, estimating the migrant share stops being a statistical exercise and becomes a symbol of a broader sense of being squeezed. And symbols travel faster than numbers.

So perhaps the real question is not whether Europe is full. The real question is what, exactly, makes it feel full. If it were only about proportions, the debate would end with the data. It does not. Because it is also about who is counted as inside, who is recognized, and where solidarity begins and ends. Demography gives us baseline reality; perception gives us the political climate.

I want to end with a small question: when you hear Europe is full, do you think the sentence is describing numbers, or is it naming something else?

References

Council of the European Union. (2018). Migration: Eurobarometer 2018. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/migration-eurobarometer-2018/ 

Eurostat. (2025). EU population diversity by citizenship and country of birth. European Commission. ​​https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=EU_population_diversity_by_citizenship_and_country_of_birth 

Ipsos. (2024). The perils of perception 2024. https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2024-11/ipsos-the-perils-of-perception-2024.pdf 

Our World in Data. (2024). Many people overestimate the percentage of immigrants in their country. https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/many-people-overestimate-the-percentage-of-immigrants-in-their-country