The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #124011   Message #2743382
Posted By: Keith A of Hertford
11-Oct-09 - 07:31 AM
Thread Name: BS: UK immigration too high?
Subject: RE: BS: UK immigration too high?
Welcome back Royston.
Before you left you made the extraordinary statement,"the TRUTH NOW is that immigration is falling through the statistical floor and is not exactly a live issue either NOW or in the FUTURE, based on present levels."
I asked you twice to give a source or any credible person who agreed, but you have chosen not to.
We can draw our own conclusions.

In your latest post you forgot to provide links.
Did you not want us to see the full story?

Now you ask me about Migrationwatch and their views on the current situation.
Here are some extracts from a BBC piece from February this year.

"...the biggest decline - 21% - coming from new EU nations such as Poland.

But figures also show a 290,000 rise in overseas-born UK residents, which hit 6.5 million in the year to June 2008."

"There are no official figures on the outflow of migrants to accession countries but Sir Andrew Green, of pressure group Migration Watch, said the flow from and to Eastern Europe would "come into balance before very long" and the "main pressure was now immigration from outside the EU" which unlike EU migration the government could control. "

"Other figures released earlier reveal the number of people from outside the EU granted the right to settle in the UK was 145,965, an increase of 17% on the previous year.

This was largely down to an increase in the number of people allowed to stay because of their job, which returned to 2005 levels.

Asylum applications were 10% higher in 2008 at 25,670 "

Commenting on the figures, shadow immigration minister Damian Green, for the Conservatives, said: "Even at a time when short-term applications are falling because of the dreadful state of the British economy, grants of settlement are up 17% mainly because of foreign workers who have come here and decided to stay.

"This shows how foolish Gordon Brown's promise of British jobs for British workers was.

"The asylum statistics are ominous, as they show the first signs of a system sliding back into the chaos of previous years. Applications are up 10%, decisions are down 11%, and the number waiting for an initial decision has risen by a third. "

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7906277.stm