In one of my previous posts I looked at numbers and trends for migration between Australian and Croatia – https://www.croatiansunited.com/over-4000-australians-have-moved-to-croatia/
This time I will look at the same for migration between USA and Croatia. The data available is from 2001 to 2023.
In this period 6311 people have migrated from America with a 23 year average of 274 persons per year.
For all Americans with or without Croatian citizenship we had a rising trend before the Global Financial Crisis that peaked at 355 people in 2007. A sharp drop happened in 2009 and bottomed in 2010 with only 101 people. From that bottom we started an upward trend that has lasted until this day and is now hitting record numbers above 400 people in the last 3 years, 2021 being the record year with 470 people. It is a bit hard to say where it will go from here but at this stage we are still in a rising trend.
For the same period and for all Americans we had very low numbers (30 or less) emigrating to USA until the GFC. An upward trend in emigration starts in 2009 and spikes above 100 people in 2011. This rises sharply over 300 people a year over the next few years and plateaus just under 400 people until Covid. During Covid due to the lockdowns emigration drops down to around 219 people for 2020. Post Covid we have a spike of 526 in 2022 to return back to 402 for 2023. It looks like it will probably stay around 400 people a year for emigration to USA.
Net migration for this period was in a rising trend until 2007 where it peaked at 327 people. Post GFC we have a falling trend until 2015 where we hit a rock bottom of -167 net migration. We remained in negative terrority until 2019 which had only +2 and have remained in the positive until 2022 where we fell to -61 net migration to finish 2023 with a +50.
The total immigrated for this period is 6311 people, emigrated 4341 people and net migration of 1970 people. I don’t believe this data shows the complete picture. I don’t believe we are at 1970 people. Around 2013 started the negative feedback loop the press made with Croatians leaving for EU countries. At this time Croatians looked for countries to leave to and I think a decent amount of them ended up in America.
Many that migrated to Croatia in the years prior, like myself got hit hard in the 4 years of recession and I think many returned to USA. However, I think that they are less than one half of the 4341 people and the rest are ones that emigrated to USA for the first time during the recession and years after.
So I think the reaslistic total for Americans living in Croatia is 2800 to 3200 people if you factor in 10-20% of those immigrated haved died in the last 23 years.
The statistics for Americans that have Croatian citizenship doesn’t differ much from the data for all Americans until 2010. It is in 2011 that the number of American’s without Croatian citizenship starts to rapidly rise to a point that from 2012 until 2014 they outnumber Croatian citizens that immigrated. The last six years Americans without Croatian citizenship make up over 40% of those that migrate each year to Croatia. The total number of Americans with Croatian citizenship that have migrated to Croatia in 23 years is 4456, emigrated to America 3412 and net migration is 1044.
The number of Americans that have migrated to Croatia that don’t have Croatian citizenship was negligible until 2011. It has remained in an upward trend since then and plateaued for now at 200 people a year. The total number of Americans without Croatian citizenship that have migrated to Croatia in 23 years is 1855, emigrated to USA 929 and net migration is 926.
Leave a Reply