Back in late summer, the ever-perspicacious Vince Cable, predicted that “if we get into a serious recession, immigration will become negative, as it has before.” According to the Office for National Statistics, this has now come to pass, with data showing that immigration into Britain fell by 8.9 percent to 577,000 last year. Separate Home Office figures show the number from the eight eastern European nations including Poland that joined the EU in 2004 dropped for a fourth consecutive quarter.
At the same time, Eurostat – the EU’s statistical bureau – released immigration figures for 2006. These figures show a couple of interesting things. First, in 2006 about 3 million foreign immigrants settled in an EU country, with 1.2 million being from another EU country and 1.8 being non-EU citizens. The largest foreign immigrant groups were citizens of Poland (about 290,000 persons), Romania (about 230,000), Morocco (about 140,000), Britain, Ukraine and China (each about 100,000) and Germany (about 90,000).
So who took in the most immigrants? In 2006, the largest number of foreign immigrants was recorded in Spain (803,000 persons), Germany (558,500) and then Britain (451,700), who together received 60% of all foreign immigrants in the EU.
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