One area of confusion when talking about immigrants is deciding [1]who exactly is a foreigner. Here the key distinction is between someone who is ‘foreign-born’ and someone who has a foreign nationality - that is, who travels on a passport issued by another country. Any immigrant who naturalizes as a citizen of their new country immediately ceases to be a ‘foreigner’ but he or she will always be foreign-born. According to the US census for 1990, 7.9% of the population were foreign-born, but only 4.7% were still foreigners because the rest had become naturalized citizens. This means that the proportion of foreigners will depend to a certain extent on[2] [become, how, to, is, a, it, citizen, easy]. In France, for example, the proportion of residents who are foreigners has remained fairly stable since 1975, at 6 to 7%, but the proportion who are foreign-born is probably around 11%. In Germany on the other hand, naturalization has traditionally been more difficult so the proportion of foreigners remains ( [3] ).
A further complication is that some people regard anyone belonging to an ethnic minority ( [4] ) an immigrant, even if they have been born in that country. In the United Kingdom around 6% of the population belong to a minority ethnic group. The foreign-born however are only 4%, and many of those are ‘white’ people who have come from Europe, Australia and elsewhere