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Immigration out-paces British exodus Philip Johnston Britain is experiencing unprecedented levels of immigration with more than half a million foreigners arriving to live here in a single year, new figures show. Last year, 510,000 foreign migrants came to the UK to stay for at least 12 months, according to the Office for National Statistics. At the same time 400,000 people, more than half of whom were British, emigrated. An exodus on this scale - amounting to one British citizen leaving the country every three minutes - has not been seen in the UK for almost 50 years. Overall in 2006, there were a record 591,000 new arrivals. Only 14 per cent of these were Britons coming home.
It is the first time the number of foreign migrants has topped half a million and the statistics do not include hundreds of thousands of east Europeans who have arrived to work in Britain in the past two years. This is because most say they are coming for less than 12 months and do not show up as long-term immigrants. The figures suggest that only one sixth of the immigrants were from the states which joined the EU in 2004.
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