The UK streets where more than 3 in 4 babies have migrant mothers
‘This is not what the majority want’
A RECORD proportion of babies were born to foreign mothers last year, official figures showed yesterday.
A steadily growing share of births in England and Wales are to immigrant mothers.
In 2017, 28.4 per cent of births were to mothers from outside Britain, up from 28.2 per cent in 2016. In some parts of Britain it was as high as three children in four.
It was the largest percentage since 1969, when information on parents’ country of birth was first collected at the time a new child was registered.
Campaigners said the statistics were a striking illustration of the way mass migration is changing the face of the country – and placing additional pressure on public services, including hos- pitals, schools and housing. The proportion has risen every year since 1990, when the level was 11.6 per cent.
It had grown to 19.5 per cent in 2004 – the year Tony Blair’s Labour government threw open the doors to migrants from Eastern Europe.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said there were 192,651 births to foreign mothers in 2017 – down by 1.8 per cent on 2016. In total, there were 679,106 babies born last year in England and Wales – a decrease of 2.5 per cent.
Poles topped the list for mothers born outside Britain, with 20,779 births. This was a six-fold increase on the 3,403 children born to Polish mothers in 2005.
It was followed by Pakistan (17,099), while Romania (13,717) moved into third place for the first time, fuelled by a surge in adults from the Eastern European country arriving in the UK after the employment restrictions were lifted in 2014.
Romania overtook India, which was on 13,476.
Some 71,472 babies were born to mothers from the EU in 2017 – up from 44,022 in 2008, or 62 per cent. Including foreign-born fathers, around one in three babies had at least one parent from overseas. Pakistan was the most common country of birth for fathers born outside the UK with 18,513, followed by Poland (15,610) and India (13,715).
Alp Mehmet, vice-chairman of think- tank MigrationWatch, which campaigns for tighter controls on migration, said: ‘This is another factor indicating how migration is contributing huge numbers to the population.
‘This sounds another warning bell about the impact of mass immigration. The consequences of this are increased pressure on housing, schools and the NHS and the changing nature of our society.
‘This is indicative of the scale and speed that it is all happening and it can’t be in the interests of this country and it is certainly not what the majority of people in this country want.
‘The Government must honour its manifesto commitment to reduce net migration to sustainable levels.’
The ONS said the figures showed that fertility levels were higher among foreign- born women and that they were more likely to be of childbearing age than the rest of the population.
In some parts of the UK, threequarters of children were born to foreign mothers in 2017.
In Brent, north-west London, it was 75.7 per cent while in the east London borough of Newham the proportion was 74.1 per cent. Slough in Berkshire had the highest percentage outside London at 62.8 per cent followed by Luton with 59.3 per cent. But the ONS paper also revealed that the total fertility rate – which predicts how many children a typical woman would have in their lifetime on current patterns – fell to 1.71 children per foreign-born woman, the lowest level since 2005.
Yesterday the Daily Mail told how a report claimed that babies born to foreign-born migrants had contributed to the unprecedented surge in Britain’s population this century.
Some 82 per cent of the huge rise from 2001 to 2016 could be attributed to the arrival of immigrants and, subsequently, their UK-born children, according to an analysis of ONS data by MigrationWatch. It claimed that of the 6.6million extra added to the population during those years, 5.4million were the result of mass immigration.