The truth about East European migration: One in 30 Latvians are living in Britain, one in 60 Poles are also over here - and statistics don't even show latest influx The astonishing scale of Eastern European migration to Britain is revealed today in figures uncovered by the Daily Mail. They show that 1.3 per cent of Eastern Europeans living anywhere in Europe – including in their native countries – are now in the UK. It means one in 75 of those born in eight former communist nations that joined the EU in 2004 is resident here – and the true numbers are likely to be even greater as the figures are three years old For some individual countries, the proportions of their citizens living here are particularly high. One in 30 Lithuanians in Europe now lives in Britain, as do one in 30 Latvians, one in 60 Poles and one in 200 Hungarians. Since the statistics were recorded in 2011, Eastern European migrants have continued to flock to the UK. Yesterday new figures also showed Britain is giving citizenship to more migrants than any other EU country – with 193,000 foreign nationals given passports in 2012. Since 2000, more than 2.1million migrants have acquired British citizenship. The figures are calculated from census data showing how many people born in each country are resident in Britain, how many are still at home and how many have moved elsewhere in Europe. It shows there are around 654,000 Polish nationals in the UK out of 41.5million in Europe – meaning 1.6 per cent live here. The scale of the migration from Lithuania is even more stark. A total of 108,000 Lithuanians live in Britain, some 3.4 per cent of all those in Europe. Lithuania has a much smaller population at around three million. A total of 61,440 Latvians live in Britain – or 3.2 per cent of the 1.9million anywhere in Europe. For Slovakia the figure is 1.2 per cent, for the Czech Republic 0.4 per cent, Estonia 0.7 per cent and Hungary 0.5 per cent. Between 2004 and last year, the population of Eastern European migrants in Britain rose by 544 per cent, from around 167,000 to 1,077,000. Dr Carlos Vargas-Silva, the Observatory’s acting director, said: ‘Eastern European migration to the UK is not a completely new phenomenon – Polish people were the second largest foreign-born group in the UK, after Irish born people, in the 1951 census. But the scale of change that the UK has seen in the last decade is significantly greater.’ EU migration has blown a hole in the Government’s attempts to fulfil a pledge to cut net migration to below the tens of thousands, and helped fuel the rise of Ukip. David Cameron has promised to secure major reforms to free movement rules ahead of a proposed referendum in 2017. On Tuesday Labour sought to toughen its position on migration by suggesting it would seek to negotiate a two-year ban on some benefit claims for EU migrants. But last night Eurosceptic Tory MPs said the figures showed Britain needed to reclaim control of its borders by leaving the EU. Backbench Conservative MP for Shipley Philip Davies said: ‘These figures are staggering. This is the inevitable consequence of opening our borders when Britain is creating more jobs than the rest of the EU put togethe Today’s figures expose the vast exodus from Eastern European nations to Britain since border controls were dropped ten years ago. The data was compiled by the independent Migration Observatory at Oxford University and is based on census data from across the continent in 2011. Figures released in August showed the number of migrants from the eight newly-joined Eastern European countries working in Britain rose by more than a quarter in a year. Romanian and Bulgarian migrant numbers have also continued to increase. The influx has placed huge pressure on public services including the NHS, schools and housing. Immigration is now among the top two biggest concerns cited by the public in opinion polls The figures also show how the populations of Eastern European countries have been hollowed out by emigration over the last decade. The Daily Mail understands that senior Eastern European politicians have raised the issue of domestic ‘brain drain’ with Mr Cameron in high-level talks. It raises the prospect of them lending their support for his proposed reforms. Last week, Lithuanian Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevičius spoke publicly about the huge numbers of his population to have moved to Britain in recent years, after meeting Mr Cameron at a conference in Finland. Downing Street officials confirmed that other EU countries had raised concerns that they face the opposite problem to that seen in Britain. The PM has pledged to put reform of immigration rules at the centre of his renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with Europe.

• published: 20 Nov 2014
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