Albanians in Austria: A 100,000-Strong Community

How many Albanians live in Austria?

More than 100,000 people — of whom about 75,000 are directly visible in official tables. Austria, like Germany, does not record ethnicity. But it records two things instead of one, and that changes what can be known.

On 1 January 2026, 78,074 people living in Austria had been born in Kosovo, North Macedonia or Albania. On the same day, only 61,444 held one of those three citizenships. The 16,630-person difference is not a rounding error or a rival estimate: it is the same population counted two ways, and the gap is made of people who were born there and have since become Austrian — or who never held the passport of the country they were born in.

Building the estimate

Birthplace is the better foundation, because it counts the first generation whatever passport they now carry. Kosovo contributes 39,298 and Albania 6,523 directly. North Macedonia needs the one coefficient this page uses: its 2021 census found that 66.36 percent of the country’s registered nonresident population identified as Albanian, so the 32,253 North Macedonia-born residents contribute approximately 21,403.

Then there is the second generation that birthplace cannot see: children born in Austria who still hold a Kosovar, Albanian or North Macedonian passport rather than an Austrian one. Austria publishes the national figure — 288,698 people born in Austria hold a foreign citizenship, 15.4 percent of all foreign nationals — and applying that share to the three citizenship rows adds approximately 8,000 more.

The two measures overlap imperfectly — someone born in Kosovo may hold Serbian citizenship, and the second-generation share is a national average applied to three specific groups. This is an order-of-magnitude model, not a count of unique individuals.

What lies beyond the 75,000 is a list of named, documented gaps rather than speculation: Albanians from the Preševo Valley counted inside Austria’s 141,785 Serbia-born residents; Albanians from Montenegro; families who naturalised and whose Austrian-born children appear in no origin row at all. Every one of those is opened up and bounded in the full ledger at the end of this page.

Sixty years: the agreement, the factories, the war

Austria’s Albanian story begins with a signature, and the date is usually printed wrong. The Agreement between the Republic of Austria and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on the employment of Yugoslav workers in Austria was signed in Vienna on 19 November 1965 — signed for Austria by Bruno Kreisky. The commonly cited “4 April 1966” is simply the day it appeared in the Federal Law Gazette. Either way, Austria was ahead of its neighbour: West Germany’s equivalent Yugoslav agreement came in October 1968.

The treaty was unusually explicit about money going home. Article 13 guaranteed Yugoslav workers the right to transfer their surplus Austrian earnings “in free schillings or other freely convertible currency” — remittances written into international law from the first day. Recruitment itself was run by a standing bilateral commission of at most three members per side, which decided who came.

The numbers moved fast. Foreign employment in Austria rose from about 17,700 in 1962 to roughly 250,000 at the 1973 peak, and Yugoslav citizens made up 78.5 percent of that total. Among them, invisibly, were Albanians from Kosovo and western North Macedonia. No Austrian record of the era distinguished them — but the scholarship identifies them by a distinctive signature: the near-total absence of women. Kosovo-Albanian labour migration in this period was overwhelmingly male and expected to be temporary.

It was not temporary. After the 1974 recruitment stop, the men who stayed brought wives and children, and a rotating workforce became a resident community. That is the same arc as Germany’s — but Austria’s began first, which is why the third generation here is now genuinely adult.

1999: an evacuation built on the guest workers

The Kosovo war produced the community’s second defining moment, and Austria’s version of it has a detail that no other country’s does. In 1998 and 1999 together, more than 13,000 Yugoslav citizens — for the most part Kosovars — applied for asylum in Austria, and 2,953 were granted refugee status. Alongside that, Austria ran an evacuation: 5,123 Kosovo Albanians were flown out of camps in Macedonia, with a further 127 admitted via the Austrian Embassy in Tirana.

The selection criterion, as the Interior Ministry later told Parliament, was family ties to Kosovo Albanians already living in Austria as guest workers, refugees or asylum seekers. In other words: the 1999 rescue ran along the family lines laid down by the 1965 agreement. The men recruited into Austrian factories in the late 1960s were, three decades later, the reason their relatives could be evacuated from a war. The programme peaked at 5,046 people in care on 3 June 1999; by April 2000 only 1,227 remained.

Since then: a work route, narrow but real

Kosovo has been on Austria’s list of safe countries of origin since the original Herkunftsstaaten-Verordnung — not, as is sometimes written, since 2015. In Austria’s record asylum year of 2015, Kosovo was the sixth-largest nationality with 2,487 applications, of which just 10 received asylum. Albania barely registers in Austrian asylum statistics at all: its peak was 140 applications, the opposite of the German experience.

What exists instead is labour migration through quotas. The Saisonkontingentverordnung 2026 sets a tourism quota of 5,500 and, additionally, 2,500 places reserved specifically for citizens of Bosnia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia — Austria’s own, much smaller answer to Germany’s Western Balkans Regulation. Albania is not included. Above that sits the Rot-Weiß-Rot-Karte for shortage occupations, where Albania ranked ninth among all nationalities in 2022 with 158 cards.

Where do Albanians live in Austria?

Ask where Austria’s Balkan communities live and the honest answer is: it depends which one you mean. 62 percent of Austria’s Serbian citizens live in Vienna. The Albanian-speaking communities are far more spread out — and the Kosovars least concentrated of all.

On 1 January 2026, Upper Austria held 8,216 Kosovo citizens against Vienna’s 7,501. Measured by birthplace the two are level (10,190 against 10,326). Either way, the pattern is clear: the Kosovar community followed the industrial corridor — Linz, Wels, Steyr — not the capital. That is the direct inheritance of the 1965 agreement, which fed workers into factories, not into offices.

Vienna still leads overall, and by a distance on two of the three tracks: 53 percent of Austria’s Albanian citizens and 40 percent of its North Macedonian citizens live in the capital. Within the city the Balkan communities concentrate in the working-class west and south — Favoriten, Ottakring, Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus, Simmering, Floridsdorf. Favoriten and Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus are Vienna’s most international districts, both 46.2 percent non-Austrian; in Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus a majority of residents were born abroad.

Beyond Vienna, the picture is genuinely federal. Graz counted 1,925 Kosovars, 887 North Macedonians and 317 Albanians in July 2026. The City of Salzburg recorded 785 Kosovars and 606 North Macedonians. Vorarlberg — Austria’s most Turkish state — has among its smallest Albanian-speaking populations, a reminder that guest-worker geography was built village by village, not by any national logic.

The door that closed

Here is where Austria’s story separates permanently from Germany’s. In June 2024 Germany dropped the requirement to give up your old passport and cut the residence requirement to five years; naturalisations from the Albanian-speaking world promptly hit record highs. Austria moved the other way eighteen years earlier and has never reversed it. The door was not always shut: in 2003 Austria naturalised 44,694 residents. Then it changed the rules.

Austrian law does not merely prefer that you renounce your previous citizenship. Under §20 of the Staatsbürgerschaftsgesetz, citizenship is first only promised — granted conditionally on proof that you have left your old nationality behind. Under §10(3), it must not be granted to someone who fails to take the steps to do so. The standard residence requirement is ten years. The income test looks back six years and requires evidence of sufficient regular income in 36 of those 72 months.

The effect is visible in a single chart.

The 2006 reform (BGBl. I Nr. 37/2006, in force 23 March 2006) raised the residence, income and language thresholds together. Resident naturalisations fell from 44,694 in 2003 to 6,135 in 2010 — a drop of 86 percent. In Vienna the collapse was steeper still, from 18,085 to 1,745. Two decades later the figure has recovered only to 15,512, about a third of the 2003 level, in a country whose foreign population has meanwhile grown by hundreds of thousands.

For the Albanian-speaking community specifically, the annual numbers are small and stable. In 2025 Austria naturalised 414 former Kosovo citizens, 272 North Macedonian, 105 Albanian and 11 Montenegrin. Across the twelve years from 2014 to 2025, those four origins together produced 10,597 new Austrians — roughly five years' worth of the community’s own growth, spread over twelve. Austria’s overall naturalisation rate in 2025 was 0.8 percent; for Kosovo citizens it works out at about 1.4 percent.

Born here, foreign anyway

Austria has no birthright citizenship. A child born in Vienna to Kosovar parents is born a Kosovar. On 1 January 2026, 288,698 people living in Austria had been born in Austria and did not hold Austrian citizenship — 15.4 percent of all foreign nationals in the country. In Vienna alone the figure is 113,549.

Birth in Austria does shorten the wait: §11a allows naturalisation after six years rather than ten. But six years of continuous lawful residence, a clean record, adequate income and language certification is a long road for a person who has never lived anywhere else.

The vote a third of the city does not have

Citizenship in Austria is not a formality — it is the vote. There is no local franchise for third-country nationals. Vienna tried to create one in 2003, extending district-level voting rights to long-resident non-citizens; the Constitutional Court struck the law down on 30 June 2004, holding that the federal constitution reserves the franchise to citizens.

At Vienna’s municipal election on 27 April 2025, 610,795 residents of voting age — 35.6 percent — could not take part. Among 31-to-44-year-olds the share was 46.4 percent; among 16-to-30-year-olds, 44.4 percent. The share has more than doubled since 2002, when it was 15.9 percent. And these are not all new arrivals: at the start of 2023 Vienna was home to 101,072 people born in Austria without an Austrian passport, 27,082 of them already of voting age.

This is the structural fact that shapes Albanian civic life in Austria. It explains why no candidate of Albanian origin was elected to Austria’s 183-seat Nationalrat in September 2024, and why Albanian political participation is strongest at the level where residence rather than citizenship still counts for something — school boards, works councils, associations, and small-town councils. The community’s civic energy is real; the franchise simply has not caught up with it.

Work, money and the transnational economy

The 1965 agreement sent Albanians into Austrian factories, and their descendants are still disproportionately in the sectors that build and run the country. Among men working in Austrian construction, 36.6 percent have a migration background, second only to hospitality at 57.3 percent. In 2024 there were 10,902 employees with Kosovo citizenship and 11,885 with North Macedonian citizenship in Austria.

The money that flows the other way is documented at the receiving end. The Central Bank of Kosovo records that Austria sent €59.1 million to Kosovo in 2025 — 4.18 percent of Kosovo’s total remittance inflow of €1.41 billion, making Austria the fourth-largest source country after Germany, Switzerland and the United States. That figure has grown 154 percent since 2015, when it was €23.2 million; since 2009, Austria has sent roughly €671 million in total. Article 13 of the 1965 treaty is still working.

Some of that money travels through Austrian institutions in the other direction: Raiffeisen Bank Kosovo is the country’s largest bank by loans, with 36 branches and 937 employees, so a transfer from Linz often lands in an Austrian-owned branch in Pristina. Austria has been a priority donor in Kosovo since 1999, and its goods trade with the country runs a steady surplus — €116 million exported against €17 million imported in 2025.

There is a harder number underneath all this. Self-employment among people with a non-EU ex-Yugoslav background stands at 4.8 percent — the lowest of any origin group measured in Austria, against 10.6 percent for people without a migration background, and median net annual income was €26,878 in 2023 against €33,424. The community’s economic position is solid in employment and weak in ownership: which is what sixty years of arriving through a labour quota, rather than a business visa, tends to produce.

Language, faith and community

The clearest measure of whether a community is staying is what its children speak at home. In Austria, the answer is unambiguous.

16,412 pupils named Albanian as their first everyday language in 2024/25 — sixth among non-German languages, statistically level with Bosnian (16,444) and behind only Turkish, Arabic, Serbian and Romanian. Among four- and five-year-olds in early-childhood education, Albanian is already the sixth most common first language, spoken by 1.9 percent of them, ahead of Hungarian, Polish and Ukrainian. A language does not reach that position in a country’s nurseries unless families are deciding, deliberately and at scale, to pass it on.

They have institutional help, and it predates the community’s own visibility. Albanian supplementary teaching in Vienna dates to 1987, when Kosovo’s education authorities posted Shefqet Gashi there as its first Albanian teacher; it was later absorbed into Austria’s state-supported muttersprachlicher Unterricht. By 2018/19 Albanian was the fourth-largest of 26 languages in the system, with 1,651 pupils, 22 teachers and 319 weekly teaching hours. Tellingly, it is taught most outside the capital: Upper Austria had 594 Albanian pupils that year against Vienna’s 301 — the factory geography again.

At the last census that asked (2001), 28,212 residents gave Albanian as their colloquial language, of whom 3,766 were already Austrian citizens. Austria has not asked since.

Two faiths, one community

Albanian religious life in Austria is organised, legally recognised and split much as it is at home. Muslim Albanians have their own constituted body inside the Islamic Religious Community in Austria: ALKIG, the Albanische Kultusgemeinde der IGGÖ. The oldest and largest Albanian mosque community, the Verein Albanischer Muslime in Wien, was founded on 7 June 1994 in Vienna’s 16th district.

The Albanian-speaking Catholic community of the Archdiocese of Vienna, founded in 1993, counts roughly 1,300 families and more than 6,000 faithful across Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, with a Vienna core of over 400 families. It has been led since 2012 by Don Nikson Shabani, only the fourth pastor in its history — a reminder that Albanian Austria is not only a Muslim story.

The summer road home

Every July and August the community empties toward the south, and the airlines plan for it. Austrian Airlines will operate 766 Vienna–Pristina flights in summer 2026, 80 more than the previous summer and 10,939 extra seats; frequencies rise from 10–12 weekly in spring to daily-plus at the peak. In July 2021 the route ran up to three times a day for the first time in its then 21-year history. Pristina’s airport, which handled 4.6 million passengers in 2025, is at its busiest in exactly those weeks.

The people who shaped Austria

Albanian Austria is not a recent addition to the country’s cultural life. It helped build one of its landmarks, created the role that still opens its most famous festival, and made Vienna the city where the Albanian language first became a university subject. The guest workers of 1965 arrived into a relationship that was already a century old.

The engineer of the Semmering

The first Jedermann

Vienna invented Albanology

The academic study of the Albanian language began in Austria — partly through Albanians who came to study, partly through Austrians who devoted their careers to a language few of their colleagues could place on a map. Both halves belong to the story.

The line runs unbroken to the present. Vienna’s Institute for Science and Art still researches the history of Austrian Albanology, and the discipline Jokl founded is taught in Austrian universities today.

The footballers who chose Austria

Here Austria inverts the pattern of its neighbours completely. Of the players capped by Kosovo who were born abroad, 26 were born in Switzerland and 21 in Germany. Exactly one was born in Austria — Vesel Demaku, from Altenmarkt an der Triesting in Lower Austria. The reason is not that Austria has fewer Albanian footballers. It is that they played for Austria.

The pattern repeats across a generation. Besian Idrizaj, born in Baden bei Wien in 1987, was Austria’s Young Player of the Year at LASK before Liverpool signed him at seventeen; he collapsed and died in his sleep in 2010, aged 22, and Swansea City still marks the anniversary. Albert Vallçi, born in Voitsberg to a father from Mitrovica, ground his way up through Kapfenberg, Lafnitz, Horn and Innsbruck before Red Bull Salzburg signed him at 23 with no elite academy behind him. Sinan Bytyqi, brought to Austria at one year old, scored ten goals across Austria’s youth teams and signed for Manchester City before a heart condition ended his playing career at twenty — he now coaches in Vienna. And Dijon Kameri, born in Salzburg’s Maxglan district in 2004, captained Austria’s youth sides and won a Bundesliga title before turning twenty.

Where Albanian Austria actually became famous

Ask where the Albanian diaspora made its name in German-speaking Europe and the answer is usually music: Loredana and EAZ in Switzerland, Dardan and Azet in Germany, all of them chart-topping rappers. Austria has no equivalent. Work through the full roster of Austrian hip-hop artists and there is not one Albanian-origin name in the mainstream scene — no Austrian Loredana, no Austrian Dhurata Dora.

That absence has a straightforward explanation. Austria’s Albanian community is roughly a tenth the size of Germany’s, and its music market is smaller again; a German-language rap career is built in Berlin, Stuttgart or Zurich, not Linz. But reading that as an absence of Albanian cultural presence in Austria would be exactly wrong. Albanians in Austria did not reach the charts. They reached the Musikverein.

The pattern repeats across Vienna’s institutions. Eno Peçi, born in Tirana and sent to his sister in Vienna in 1998, became a soloist of the Vienna State Ballet — he has danced the ballet interludes of the New Year’s Concert and choreographed the opening of the Vienna Opera Ball in 2018 and 2020, the most-watched social event in the Austrian calendar; Albania’s president named him Ambasador i Kombit. Ardita Statovci, from Pristina, took her master’s at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and won the Bösendorfer Prize in 2006; she has been a Young Steinway Artist since 2009. Rina Kaçinari, a cellist who left Pristina at fifteen because there were no teachers left, has lived in Vienna since 2006 and won the Austrian World Music Award with her duo Catch-Pop String-Strong.

On screen

Austrian television has two Albanian-origin actors with long careers. Astrit Alihajdaraj arrived in Vienna in 1996, was discovered mid-degree by the director Barbara Albert and cast in her debut feature Nordrand (1999) — the film that put contemporary Austrian cinema on the international map. His filmography now runs 26 years. Elvis Alieva, born in Kosovo in 1991, trained at the Schauspielschule Krauss in Vienna and has built a decade of ORF credits, including a recurring role in CopStories, alongside stage work with the Volkstheater and the Serapions Ensemble.

And the feed

The largest Albanian-origin audience in Austria today belongs to neither a musician nor an actor. Almira Azemi, an ethnic Albanian from Kumanovo who has lived in Vienna since 2007 and works as a cosmetologist, has over a million TikTok followers — a bigger audience than any Albanian-Austrian performer in any field, built from a Vienna salon in Albanian and German. Elsa Latifaj, born and raised in Baden bei Wien to a family with Kosovar roots, reached season 18 of Germany’s Next Topmodel in 2023 and has worked steadily in German-language reality television since.

How do Albanians in Austria connect today?

The community’s meeting places are the ones sixty years of settlement built: the mosque associations and the Catholic mission, the cultural societies and their annual Culture Week, the Saturday mother-tongue classes in Linz and Vienna, the football clubs, the family businesses along the Gürtel and in Linz’s industrial districts. The Albanian National Diaspora Agency keeps a wider official directory of the clubs and associations that hold this network together.

What has changed is everything between those places. Austria’s Albanian community is spread across nine federal states, and the largest single group of Kosovars does not live in the capital. Someone in Wels and someone in Favoriten belong to the same community and may never cross paths — which is precisely the problem a diaspora platform exists to solve.

If you wanted to meet another Albanian, where did you go?

That question is sharper in Austria than almost anywhere. The community is large enough to fill a mid-sized city and scattered across nine federal states, with its biggest Kosovar concentration in Upper Austria and its biggest Albanian and North Macedonian ones in Vienna — 200 kilometres apart. A general dating app in Wels will not find you the person in Favoriten.

It also will not find you many Albanians at all. On a mainstream platform, the chance that the next profile is Albanian and someone you actually like is vanishingly small — and for a community where marrying inside the culture is still a common expectation, whether stated by family or simply preferred, that arithmetic decides how long the search takes. Most people solve it the way the community always has: through a cousin, a wedding, a village connection, a friend of a friend. That works, and it also means your options are whoever your relatives happen to know.

dua.com starts where those odds fail. Everyone there already shares the language and the cultural ground, so the discovery pool can be entirely Albanian before the first swipe — nobody has to explain what Bajram is, why a phone call with the mother lasts forty minutes, or what it means when the family says they would like to meet you. Compatibility is still personal and still hard. But the geography and the arithmetic stop being the obstacle.

Connecting across Austria — and beyond it

Austria sits in the middle of the German-speaking Albanian world. The communities of Bavaria, Vorarlberg, eastern Switzerland and Austria have overlapped for decades through work, marriage and family — the same villages in Kosovo and western North Macedonia sent people to all of them. For a community that cannot vote in Austria but can move freely across it, the practical horizon has always been regional rather than national.

dua.com’s first-party data shows that horizon directly. Flight Mode lets members search in a city other than their own, and members living in Germany search more often within the DACH region — Germany, Switzerland and Austria — than in Albania or Kosovo. Austria sits inside the region that pattern describes. The preference is not simply to look back towards a family’s country of origin; shared German-language life, short travel distances, comparable work rhythms and the plain possibility of building a future without changing legal systems appear to matter more.

In practice that means Vienna connects with Linz, Graz, Salzburg, Innsbruck and Wels, but also with Munich, Zurich, St. Gallen and Stuttgart. Vorarlberg is closer to St. Gallen than to Vienna; Tyrol is closer to Munich. Flight Mode makes that larger German-speaking Albanian community searchable, which is the closest thing this diaspora has to a single map of itself.

Sixty years, and counting

The men recruited under the 1965 agreement are grandfathers now. Their sons and daughters were the ones evacuated to their relatives in 1999, or born in Austrian hospitals in the years between. Their grandchildren move between German and Albanian, and 16,412 of them name Albanian as their first everyday language to their schools each year.

Almost none of that generation can vote. They were born in Linz and Vienna and Wels into a citizenship system that was built for guest workers who were expected to leave, and never rebuilt for the families who stayed. That is the sixty-year arc of Albanian Austria: a community the country recruited early, relied on continuously, counted carefully — and has still not quite decided to call its own.

Love, family and the next generation

Everything in the citizenship chapter is decided by the state. What happens at home is decided by the people. If you grew up Albanian in Austria, you may know the particular feeling: the community is large enough to fill a mid-sized city, and it can still be strangely hard to find someone who understands both halves of your life at once — the German-language schooling and the Austrian working rhythm on one side, and on the other the language, the family closeness and the cultural memory that never needed translating.

dua.com exists to close exactly that gap. Not an abstract demographic label, but a person who recognises the same jokes, the same expectations, the same contradictions and the same sense of belonging — and who does not need either half of you explained.

Watch: Gentiana and Xhemajl tell their story

Gentiana, an HR professional raised in Berlin, and Xhemajl, an entrepreneur living in Hamburg, both had roots in Pristina — the same origin, at opposite ends of the country they actually lived in. Their first call lasted six hours. After a difficult six-month separation they chose one another again, became engaged on 3 October 2024 and married in Pristina in July 2025.

Practical directory for Albanians in Austria

Primary and community-run resources covering diplomacy, work, language and civic life. Always verify current requirements on the linked site.

The full ledger: what “100,000” does — and does not — claim

Everything above told the story. This section shows its accounting. More than 100,000 is the page’s description of the community; about 75,000 is what the two official measures can show together.

The two coefficients this page uses

The model applies exactly two assumptions, both stated and both sourced. The first is North Macedonia’s 2021 census finding that 66.36 percent of its registered nonresident population identified as Albanian — a diaspora-wide figure, not an Austria-specific survey, but far more defensible than treating all 32,253 North Macedonia-born residents as Albanian, or than applying the roughly 24 percent resident share to a population defined by emigration. The second is Austria’s own published figure that 15.4 percent of foreign nationals were born in Austria, applied to the three citizenship rows to estimate the second generation still on a foreign passport. Kosovo and Albania enter at their full published values with no coefficient at all.

Why birthplace is the better base — and where it still fails

Country of birth counts the first generation regardless of what passport they now hold, which is why it is the foundation here. But it cannot see anyone born in Austria, and Austria’s community is old enough that this is a large blind spot. Conversely, citizenship counts Austrian-born children who kept the family passport, but loses everyone who naturalised. Neither measure alone is the community; combined, and with the overlap acknowledged, they give a floor of roughly 75,000.

The routes that stay visible but count zero

A route enters the subtotal only when Austria publishes a population figure and a defensible ethnic split exists. Where either is missing, the row is listed and contributes nothing.

One data break to be honest about

Between 1 January 2025 and 1 January 2026, Austria’s Kosovo-born count rose by 3,045 to 39,298 — far above its recent trend of roughly 800 a year — while Serbia-born fell by 2,727. There was no comparable jump on the citizenship side, and the number of residents with an unknown country of birth fell from 15,674 to 7,094 in the same step. This has the signature of a coding revision — records previously filed under Serbia or under no country at all being resolved to Kosovo — rather than a sudden wave of arrivals. It does not change the community’s size; it changes which row describes it. Readers comparing this page with an older Austrian figure should know that the 2026 Kosovo-born number sits on the far side of that revision.

An independent check that does not depend on passports

The 16,412 pupils who name Albanian as their first everyday language cannot be added to the model — many of them are already inside the birthplace and citizenship rows, and some hold Austrian passports. But they cannot be explained by 61,444 passport holders either, especially once you note that the figure excludes every bilingual household where German is the dominant language. Together with the unadded routes, that is what makes more than 100,000 the honest description of the living community.

The purpose of this ledger is not to weaken the story but to show where it begins. Austria, unusually, gives us two honest measures. Used together and stated plainly, they show a community of roughly 75,000 that the state can see — and a larger one, past 100,000, that it has never been designed to count.