Money sent abroad by immigrants fell last year
Immigrants living in Greece sent a total of 922 million euros to their countries of origin last year, according to figures published on Tuesday in Brussels by Eurostat. This constitutes a 14.6 percent decline compared to the year before, when the figure had amounted to 1.08 billion euros.
Most of that money, 777 million euros, was sent to non-European Union countries, with just 145 million forward to countries within the bloc.
In contrast to the decline reported from Greece, the total amount sent from EU countries (not including the United Kingdom, for which there was no available data) increased by 2 percent last year from 2010 to 39.13 billion euros.
France accounted for 25 percent of that, or 9.7 billion euros, followed by Italy and Spain, with 19 percent each. Immigrants in Germany accounted for 8 percent and those in the Netherlands for 4 percent, or 1.5 billion euros, according to the Eurostat data.
