Immigration 'will hit a record as 250,000 arrive'
by a Daily Mail Special Affairs Correspondent - September 15, 2004
Immigration is set to reach an all-time high over the coming months, an economic think-tank warned yesterday. It predicted that 250,000 people will arrive to stay over the next 12 month - 100,000 more than the Government says are coming in each year.
Lombard Street Research said the rise will be a direct result of eight Eastern European nations joining the EU in May and Britain's decision to lift travel and employment barriers for their nationals. The projection follows figures last week which showed that 191,000 people from the new EU Eastern European states travelled to Britain in July. That was more than three times the level in both April, before the EU gates were opened, and in July last year.
The figure from a Government survey shows visitors to Britain rather than immigrants. But 70,000 of the Easter Europeans said they came to work or to study. Since May around 40,000 have arrived saying they intend to stay for more than three months. The soaring numbers compare with Home Office estimates, before the eight countries joined the EU, that immigration from them would be around 13,000 a year. Ministers insisted in the spring that worries about an invasion from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia were misplaced.
But Lombard Street Research chief economist Tim Congdon, formerly an advisor to Chancellor Gordon Brown, told The Business newspaper: "If net immigration from New Europe were to hit between 50,000 and 75,000 in the year to mid-2005, and net immigration from the rest of the world remained unchanged, overall net immigration would be an all-time high.
According to the Government's Office for National Statistics, the peak period for immigration was the year from July 2000 to June 2001, when 194,000 more people are said to have come to live in Britain than left the country. The Lombard projections are higher than those from MigrationWatch UK, which has forecast 40,000 immigrants a year from the new EU countries.
The numbers of visitors reported last week were gathered by the Government's International Passenger Survey, a poll widely regarded as flawed because it checks only one in 500 people arriving at air and seaports and taking part is voluntary. Immigrants from the eight countries are subject to curbs brought in by Home Secretary David Blunkett earlier this year. They must register if they take jobs here. In May and June, the first two months after the borders were opened, 24,000 signed on.
Incompetent and out of control
Daily Mail Comment - dateline November 11, 2004
Another gross miscalculation. Another example of hopelessly misleading spin. News that 91,000 migrants from Eastern Europe registered to work here in the first five months of EU expansion exposes yet again the incompetence of this Government's immigration policy.
Remember its assertion that at most there would only be 13,000 new entrants/year when we became one of the few EU nations to throw the doors wide open? Remember how critics - including this paper - were denounced as scaremongers for daring to suggest otherwise?
Now the evidence is there for all to see. Leaving aside the thousands working here illegally who became 'legitimate' when their countries joined the EU, the figures show an increase of 10,000 migrants/month from the old Warsaw Pact nations. That works out at 120,000/year - nearly 10 times the original estimate.
Yes, it can fairly be claimed that the overwhelming majority are an asset to this country because they are working full time, paying tax and not claiming benefits. But it is equally true that many are doing jobs that could be done by the armies of Britons living on social security or highly dubious disability benefits.
And will the advantages of immigration continue in the years ahead? Can there be confidence in an administration that gets its projections so wildly wrong? That is only the tip of the iceberg.
This Government admits it 'doesn't have a clue' how many illegals work in our black economy. Yet Ministers still don't rule out the possibility of an amnesty. Meanwhile, work permits are handed out to all and sundry outside the EU at the rate of 175,000/year, artificially reducing the number of asylum seekers.
And now we have given away our veto on asylum and immigration issues. Smoke, mirrors, acts of surrender ... these don't add up to a coherent policy. They are the marks of a nation that has lost control of its borders and Government that knows only how to pretend.