Romanian diaspora

"Romanian diaspora" is a term that encompasses the total ethnic Romanian population located outside Romania and Moldova. The term does not usually count those ethnic Romanians living as natives in the states surrounding Romania, chiefly those Romanians living in Ukraine and Serbia. The numbers of the diaspora also counts people of Romanian ancestry born in the respective country. Fact|date=February 2007 The number of all Romanians abroad is estimated at about 4-12 million people, depending on one's definition of the term "Romanian". In 2006, the Romanian diaspora was estimated at about 8 million people by the president of Romania, Traian Băsescu, most of them living in the former USSR, Western Europe (esp. Spain and France, see Romanian-French), North America, South America and Australia. [ [http://www.presidency.ro/?_RID=det&tb=date&id=7048&_PRID= Preşedintele României ] ] It is unclear if Băsescu included the Romanians living in the immediate surroundings of the Romanian state. It is also unclear if Băsescu counted Jewish-Romanians, ethnic Hungarians who are native to Northern Romania, also known as "Csángó" or "Szeklers" and Transylvanian Saxons of ethnic German origins as Romanians when he made his estimate, as well as third-generation individuals in the United States and Canada.

Below is a list of ethnic Romanians living throughout the world, they are found living in all six continents, excluding those who live in states around Romania, where the figures are estimated to be around 4 million people. There are ethnic Romanians in Turkey, both in Asian and European parts of the country, descendants of Walachian settlers invited by the Ottoman Empire from the early 14th to the late 19th centuries. Over 100,000 ethnic Romanians are living throughout far eastern Russia, thousands of Moldovan-Romanians in villages of the Amur River valley in the Chinese Manchurian side of that river, and about 2,000 Romanian immigrants in Japan since the late 20th century. Fact|date=February 2007

Distribution by country

Note: the table below contains a list of the estimated numbers of persons originating from Romania, many of which are actually ethnic Germans, Hungarians, Jews. there are no statistics regarding the ethnicity of the former Romanian citizens.

During the communist era, hundreds of thousands of Germans and Hungarians have immigrated to the west, especially to Germany, Hungary, Austria, Sweden and the USA, while the Jewish population hasmostly immigrated to Israel and the United States.

Italy and Spain have the largest populations of ethnic Romanians in Europe. Migration to this countries has happened mostly around the end of the 20th century.

References