1 out of 7 living in Britain were not born here
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 said.
The estimates mean that the share of immigrants among Britain’s population has now overtaken that in america, which is put at 13.5 per cent of the US population, or 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 proportion 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 which showed migration into the world’s rich countries has reached its highest ever 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, a number higher than the ‘net migration’ figure used by the British government to assess immigration rates. Net migration – the number of immigrants coming to the country minus the number of emigrants – for Britain was 332,000 in that year.
The OECD report said that in 2005 the proportion of for- eign-born people in Britain was 9.2 per cent.
Statisticians regard being born abroad as the best indicator of who is an immigrant, although foreign-born people include those born to British citizens living abroad. The share rose to 11.3 per cent in 2010 and 13.2 per cent in 2014 as largescale Eastern European immigration picked up following the onset of the economic downturn in 2008.
UK figures suggest that immigration continued to rise until June last year and then slipped back after the Brexit referendum. Net migration throughout 2016 fell to 248,000, the Office for National Statistics said.
Officials at the OECD said not enough is being done to welcome immigrants into their new countries and called for more international co- operation to counter ‘negative perceptions’.
Without naming any countries, it said some are ‘lagging’ in pushing through reforms to help immigrants.
But the migrationWatch UK pressure group said record levels of immigration had ‘placed a huge strain on public services, housing and our society’.