and represent the data as of February of each year for the real population. Famines and migration The famines of the 1930s, followed by the devastation of World War II, created a demographic disaster. Life expectancy at birth fell to a level as low as ten years for females and seven for males in 1933 and plateaued around 25 for females and 15 for males in the period 1941–44. According to The Oxford companion to World War II, "Over 7 million inhabitants of Ukraine, more than one-sixth of the pre-war population, were killed during the Second World War." Significant migration took place in the first years of Ukrainian independence. More than one million people moved into Ukraine in 1991–92, mostly from the other former Soviet republics. In total, between 1991 and 2004, 2.2 million immigrated to Ukraine (among them, 2 million came from the other former Soviet Union states), and 2.5 million emigrated from Ukraine (among them, 1.9 million moved to other former Soviet Union republics). As of 2015, immigrants constituted an estimated 11.4% of the total population, or 4.8 million people. In 2006, there were an estimated 1.2 million Canadians of Ukrainian ancestry, giving Canada the world's third-largest Ukrainian population behind Ukraine itself and Russia. There are also large Ukrainian immigrant communities in the United States, Poland, Australia, Brazil, and Argentina. Since about 2015 there has been a growing number of Ukrainians working in the European Union, particularly Poland. Eurostat reported that 662,000 Ukrainians received EU residence permits in 2017, with 585,439 being to Poland. World Bank statistics show that money remittances back to Ukraine have roughly doubled from 2015 to 2018, worth about 4% of GDP. However this emigration is not represented in Ukrainian migration data, measuring registrations at the State Migration Service which is usually only done by Ukrainians obtaining foreign citizenship. It is unclear if those moving to work in the EU intend this to be temporary or permanent. Population decline According to estimations of the State Statistics Service of Ukraine, the population of Ukraine (excluding Crimea) on 1 May 2021 was 41,442,615. The country's population has been declining since the 1990s because of a high emigration rate, coupled with high death rates and low birth rates. The population has been shrinking by an average of over 300,000 annually since 1993. In 2007, the country's rate of population decline was the fourth highest in the world.