How Romanians and Bulgarians fuelled the inf lux

RECORD levels of EU immigration have been fuelled by a rapid rise in arrivals from Romania and Bulgaria, figures show.

Citizens of the countries were given the right to work freely in Britain in January 2014.

Both joined the EU in 2007, but Brussels allowed Britain to restrict the employment rights of Romanians and Bulgarians for seven years.

In 2014 net migration from the two countries – the number of immigrants minus the number of emigrants – was 44,000.

But the latest figures show that in 2015 there were 65,000 arrivals from Romania and Bulgaria. Some 7,000 citizens of the two countries left Britain, so net migration last year was 58,000.

The numbers are in stark contrast to the predictions of experts who said before 2014 that few migrants would come.

Sceptics, notably the Migration Watch think-tank, pointed to the dramatically higher wages for workers in Britain compared to Eastern Europe, and suggested there would be long-term net migration from Romania and Bulgaria of 50,000 a year.

However Dr Ion Jinga, former Romanian ambassador to Britain, said just before the gates were opened in January 2014 that citizens of his country coming to the UK would be ‘fewer than in the previous years’.

Later in the year the BBC seized on misleading early job market figures to ridicule the idea that serious numbers of migrants would arrive.

The Corporation’s then political editor scoffed: ‘So much for those predictions of a flood of immigrants coming from Romania and Bulgaria once the door to the UK was opened.’

Ministers in David Cameron’s Coalition government were careful to avoid giving any estimates of how many they thought would arrive. They wanted to avoid the disastrous prediction by Tony Blair’s government in 2004 that opening the borders to Eastern Europeans would increase immigration into Britain by just 13,000 a year.

Hundreds of thousands of Poles and others came, and there are now more than two million EU citizens working in Britain.

The latest figures show that Migration Watch’s prediction of Romanian and Bulgarian immigration was not an exaggeration but an underestimate.

Higher still than the official immigration statistics are the figures for National Insurance numbers taken out by Romanians and Bulgarians.

In the year to March there were 219,000 numbers – necessary for those who want to work or claim benefits – given to migrants from the two countries. There were 179,000 issued to Romanians and 40,000 to Bulgarians.

The Office for National Statistics says many NI numbers go to short-term migrants, as well as those who have been in Britain for some time.

However, critics claim the official figures miss large numbers of European migrants, meaning the real numbers could be higher still.