Most of the immigration to the UK comes from outside the EU. Therefore, the UK should be concentrating on reducing that while we remain within the EU. - If net immigration continued to run at 200,000 pa, the figure which it has averaged for the past ten years, the UK population would reach 70 million by 2027. - The Coalition has managed to make significant progress towards their target of reducing net immigration to tens of thousands by 2015. However, the right to free movement granted to Romania and Bulgaria from 1 January 2014 could easily undermine these efforts. - The Coalition may fudge things by not including the 2014 Bulgarian/ Romanian figures in the immigration statistics before the next general election. - Very large numbers of Bulgarians are already in Spain and Italy and may well move northwards to escape the difficult economic circumstances in those countries. Green also mentioned that there are 1.5m Roma in these countries. - The official immigration figures massively understate the true level of EU immigration, perhaps by 2-3 times.
Posted on: Tue, 02 Jul 2013 19:17:17 +0000