Immigrants add over a million to our population in seven years
September 01, 2005
Immigration has added over one million to the population of the UK since 1997 says a new report out today. (Read Report)
Following the publication of the mid-year population estimates on 25 August, think-tank Migrationwatch UK has reviewed the flow of people to and from the UK so as to assess the true scale of immigration. Official Government figures were used in the calculations.
The report calculates that net immigration has added more than 1.2 million to our population in the past seven years, accounting for 81% of the total population growth in that period. This amounts to the population of Birmingham (977,000) and Nottingham (267,000) added together and is equivalent to an average growth in population due to immigration of 177,000 each year.
These figures
do not include clandestine arrivals and some who overstay their visas. An allowance of 30,000 a year for these categories brings the rate of population increase through immigration to over 200,000 a year,
or two million each decade.
‘The Government trumpet the recent fall in asylum numbers but other forms of immigration are now running at
five times the level of asylum claims,’ said Migrationwatch Chairman Sir Andrew Green.
‘It is now self evident that the failure to integrate our immigrant communities has brought us to a crisis in community relations. With immigration on the present scale it is impossible to achieve effective integration, especially as some immigrants are highly concentrated in particular areas. In a recent BBC/MORI poll 23% of Muslims said that the area in which they lived did not feel like Britain any more because of immigration.
‘We have reached a milestone. It is now essential to reduce the scale of immigration if we are to have any hope of achieving a reasonably integrated society. This is now the broad approach in Denmark and Holland. It is late in the day in Britain but we must follow their example while there is still time to do so,’ he said.
