Immigrants' Children in the EU Run Twice the Poverty Risk of Other Children

Where a child's parents were born

Eurostat's survey of income and living conditions classifies children under 18 by the country where their parents were born. That lets it publish the share of children at risk of poverty or social exclusion for two groups: children whose parents were born in the country they now live in, and children whose parents were born abroad, the children of immigrants in everyday language. The second group is split again by whether the parents were born in another EU Member State or outside the Union. The table does not separate children born in the country from children who arrived with their parents.

At risk of poverty or social exclusion, shortened to AROPE, is the EU's broad poverty measure, and for a child it is a reading of the household. A child is counted when the household's income, adjusted for its size, falls below 60% of the national median; when the household cannot afford a range of basic items and activities; or when the adults in it did very little paid work in the previous year. A child to whom more than one of these applies is counted once.

More than twice the risk

In 2025, 40.3% of children in the EU whose parents were born abroad were at risk of poverty or social exclusion. Among children whose parents were born in the country where they live, the figure was 18.5%. The first rate is more than twice the second and stands 21.8 percentage points above it, both comparisons derived here from the two published rates. Eurostat marks the EU figure for children with parents born abroad as an estimate; the figure for children with native-born parents carries no flag.

Twenty-four Member States publish both rates for 2025. In 23 of them children with parents born abroad are at higher risk, and in 14 their rate is more than double the native one. Bulgaria and Romania publish no figure for children with parents born abroad that year, and Lithuania publishes no 2025 value in the table at all.

Where the gap is widest

Spain records both the highest rate and the widest gap. There, 55.6% of children whose parents were born abroad are at risk, against 21.5% of children with Spanish-born parents, a difference of 34.1 points. On the rate, Greece follows at 46.5%, then France at 43.5% and Italy at 42.9%.

On the gap, Sweden is second at 29.5 points and Austria third at 27.4. Both start from low rates for children with native-born parents, 11.6% and 12.7%, so the distance is large in proportion as well: in Sweden the rate for children with parents born abroad, 41.1%, is more than three and a half times the native figure, the largest ratio of the 24. Germany at 23.4 points, France at 22.4 and Italy at 22.0 complete the six Member States whose gap is wider than the EU's. The Netherlands has a smaller gap, 19.0 points, but there children with native-born parents record 7.9%, the lowest such rate of the 26 Member States that publish it, so the rate for children with parents born abroad is still more than three times theirs.

Greece reads differently. Its gap of 20.0 points is close to the EU's, but there children with native-born parents record 26.5%, the third highest such rate in the Union after Romania and Bulgaria, so a gap of ordinary size sits on top of a high rate for both groups.

Where the gap is small, or reversed

Hungary is the only Member State where children whose parents were born abroad are at lower risk than children with native-born parents: 11.2% against 23.4%. The 11.2% is also the lowest rate for that group in the Union, and the pattern holds when the parents were born outside the EU, at 16.1%, which no other Member State shows. In every year since 2019, the year Hungary's series breaks, the rate for children with parents born abroad has stayed below the native one.

Malta, at 2.2 points, Latvia, at 2.7, and Croatia, at 4.8, record the narrowest gaps that run the usual way. In Malta both groups sit close together at 24.3% and 22.1%, the second of which is one of the higher rates for children with native-born parents; in Latvia and Croatia children with parents born abroad record 19.4% and 19.7%, the second and third lowest rates for that group after Hungary.

Born elsewhere in the EU, or outside it

The two groups of children with parents born abroad are far apart. Across the EU, 44.6% of children whose parents were born outside the Union were at risk in 2025, against 23.6% of children whose parents were born in another Member State, both figures estimated by Eurostat. The second group stands 5.1 points above children with native-born parents; the first stands 26.1 points above them.

Twenty Member States publish both of those rates without a low-reliability flag. In 19 of them children whose parents were born outside the EU are at higher risk than children whose parents came from elsewhere in the Union; Croatia, at 19.5% against 21.1%, is the exception. In six of the 20 — Greece, France, Hungary, Malta, the Netherlands and Portugal — children whose parents were born in another Member State are at lower risk than children with native-born parents. Italy sits at the other end, with 39.0% of children whose parents were born in another Member State at risk, the highest such rate of the 20. In Spain 59.7% of children whose parents were born outside the EU are at risk, close to six in ten and the highest such rate in the Union.

What changed since 2015

The EU series starts in 2015. Since then the rate for children with native-born parents has fallen from 24.3% to 18.5%, while the rate for children with parents born abroad has moved from 41.5% to 40.3%, so the gap between them has widened from 17.2 to 21.8 points.

Most of that widening falls in a single year. Between 2019 and 2020 the EU gap went from 18.3 to 21.7 points, and 2020 is a year of breaks in five national series. Germany's is one of them: there the rate for children with parents born abroad went from 17.1% to 35.6% in the year the series changed. Since 2021 the EU gap has stayed between 21.1 and 22.1 points. The widening is in the published figures, but how much of it describes children's lives rather than a change in how countries measure them is something the table cannot settle.

Spain's series carries no flag in any year, and it shows the same divergence without that complication: the rate for children with parents born abroad was 55.5% in 2015 and 55.6% in 2025, while the rate for children with Spanish-born parents fell from 27.4% to 21.5%. Greece, whose series is also unflagged, moved the other way. In 2015 it had the widest gap of any Member State, 35.3 points; by 2025 the rate for children with parents born abroad had fallen from 66.8% to 46.5%, and the gap to 20.0.