One in seven living in Britain was born abroad, says study

‘Huge strain put on homes and services’

NEARLY one in seven people in Britain is an immigrant, a report revealed yesterday.

The proportion of the population made up of those born abroad has risen from less than one in ten in a decade, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said.

The estimates mean that the share of immigrants among Britain’s population has now overtaken that of the United States, which has a 13.5 per cent ratio of 43,290,000 people. In Britain the migrant population of just under nine million (8,988,000) in 2015 made up 13.9 per cent of the population.

The British proportion of immigrants overtook the US’s in the same year, the OECD International Migration Outlook report found.

The new evidence of the impact of mass immigration into Britain since the turn of the millennium came in a study showing the influx into the world’s rich countries has reached its highest level.

Five million migrants moved into the 35 members countries of the OECD, the club of rich nations, in 2016 – up from 4.7million in 2015.

The report calculated the number of permanent immigrants into the UK in 2015 as 378,000, higher than the ‘net migration’ figure used by the Government.

Net migration – the immigrants total minus the number of emigrants – was 332,000 in that year.

The OECD report said that in 2005 the proportion of foreign-born people in Britain was 9.2 per cent.

UK figures suggest immigration rose until June last year and then slipped back after Brexit vote.

MigrationWatch UK said some countries were lagging behind in reforms to help migrants but warned record immigration had ‘placed a huge strain on public services, housing and our society’.