The immigrant population in Oppland is steadily increasing. At the end of 2010, Oppland was home to 11,678 immigrants and individuals born in Norway of immigrant parents. This translates to 6.3 per cent of all Oppland residents with an immigrant background. They have come originally from more than 140 countries. In the towns of Lillehammer and Gjøvik the immigrant population is greater, making up over 8 per cent of the whole.

Oppland is changing just as the rest of the country is. Since the beginning of this century the number of immigrants and people born of immigrants parents in our county has doubled, from 6,085 in 2000 to the 11,678 in 2010.

The Oppland Archive documentation project has been underway since the summer of 2007. Between then and 2010, the number of immigrants increased by almost 3,000, approximately 1,000 annually.

Figures from Statistics Norway, the country’s Central Statistics Bureau, show rapid increase in the county’s foreign citizens from the middle of the 1970s to the present. In 1976 Oppland had 1,262 residents with foreign citizenship. This was a modest 0.7 percent of the total population. Thirty-four years later in 2010, 8,166 people in Oppland had foreign citizenship, 4.4 per cent of the total. The number has climbed every year, the largest growth coming at the end of the period. (Source: Statistics Norway: Population Statistics: Number in Population by Age, Sex, Marital Status and Citizenship).
Just in the course of this three- year project significant changes have occurred in the composition of the immigrant population in Oppland.
People immigrating here to find employment, first and foremost from Poland, constitute the group showing the greatest change. At the beginning of 2007 Danes topped the list of job seekers to Oppland (725 people); Poles stood at number seven (363).
At the beginning of 2010, 1,040 Poles were registered as residents in Oppland, almost a tripling in three years. Lithuanians have moved onto the list of top twenty population groups. Four times as many Lithuanians (375) were registered in Oppland in 2010 as were three years earlier. Among people coming as refugees, the greatest increase is those from Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, and Burma. In addition there has been a marked increase in people from Sweden, Russia, Thailand and the Philippines.
A distinctive feature in Oppland is that immigrants from Pakistan, who in Norway as a whole and particularly in Oslo are a large group, here are not even on the list of the top twenty countries of immigrants’ origin.