Posted on 11/15/2007 2:11:55 PM PST by blam
Emigration soars as Britons desert the UK
By Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor
Last Updated: 6:56pm GMT 15/11/2007
Britain is experiencing the greatest exodus of its own nationals in recent history while immigration is at unprecedented levels, new figures show.
Last year, 207,000 British citizens - one every three minutes - left the country while 510,000 foreigners arrived to stay for a year or more.
The majority of people leaving the UK go to New Zealand, France, Spain or Australia
The British made up more than half of the 400,000 moving abroad - yet only 14 per cent of immigrants were UK nationals coming home.
The figures do not include hundreds of thousands of east Europeans who have come to work in Britain in the past two years.
This is because most are coming for less than 12 months and do not show up on the statistics.
The figures from the Office for National Statistics suggest that only one sixth of the immigrants in 2006 were from the states that joined the EU in 2004.
The biggest influx was from the New Commonwealth - India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka - with more than 200,000.
Since Labour came to power in 1997, 1.8m British people have left but only 979,000 have returned, Over the same period, 3.9m foreign nationals have come to Britain while 1.6m have left.
More than 50 per cent of the British emigrants moved to just four countries in 2006 - Australia, New Zealand, France and Spain. Eight in every 100 went to the USA.
The ONS said that overall last year there were 591,000 immigrants to the UK and 400,000 emigrants, both the highest figures ever recorded.
Net immigration - the difference between those leaving and arriving - was 191,000.
The departure of so many Britons is exacerbating the demographic and cultural changes caused by high levels of immigration.
Recent figures showed that despite high levels of emigration and a low birth rate, the population is still growing rapidly because of immigration.
It is growing by the equivalent to a city the size of Bristol every year.
Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migrationwatch, said: "Two thirds of yet another record level of arrivals come from outside the EU. They could and should be subject to much tighter controls."
He added: ''This gives the lie to claims that nothing effective can be done about immigration because of our membership of the EU."
Damian Green, the Conservative spokesman, said: "These figures prove that immigration is still running at unsustainably high levels.
"This is the direct result of the Government's 'open door' approach which has totally failed to consider the impact of immigration on public services, housing and community cohesion."
Sir Simon Milton, chairman of the Local Government Association, said the Government had no clear idea of where all the immigrants were going and their impact on services.
"No-one has a real grasp of where or for how long migrants are settling so much-needed funding for local services isn't getting to the right places," he said.
"The speed and scale of migration combined with the shortcomings of official population figures is placing pressure on funding for services like children's services and housing.
''This can even lead to unnecessary tension and conflict."
While immigration is the highest in the country's history, the emigration of UK nationals is running at its greatest level since before the First World War.
Little research has been done into the reasons for the exodus of Britons, though it appears more are going abroad to retire though many younger people are leaving to work.
A study last year by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) suggested that one in 12 UK nationals may now be living abroad.
There are 250,000 second homes owned by British nationals in France alone.
Surveys indicate that another one million are set to pack their bags for good over the next five years and a further 500,000 live abroad for part of the year.
Danny Sriskandarajah, of the IPPR, said: "The UK is seeing revolving turnstiles and not over-run floodgates.
"More people are on the move than ever before, with a million emigrants and immigrants crossing our borders last year."
He added: "It is also clear that immigration is an economic phenomenon, with almost half of those immigrating and emigrating doing so for work-related reasons."
More British live abroad than any other nationality. There are 41 countries with more than 10,000 British living there and another 71 countries with more than 1,000.
The levels of emigration are now back to those last seen in the late-1950s and early 1960s, when the "£10 Poms" left in their droves for Australia, enticed by subsidised travel and settlement.
The last exodus on a similar scale was before 1914, when the outflow was running at 300,000 per annum and more young men were leaving the country every year than died on the battlefields of Europe.
Between 1853 and 1913, more than 13 million British citizens left, mainly for North America, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand.
Some came back; but cumulative net emigration was equivalent to 13 per cent of the population, mostly those aged between 18 and 45.
However, there was little immigration then: the population grew because of a high birth rate.
The difference of around three million between the emigration of British nationals and immigration of foreigners represents a five per cent turnover of the entire population in ten years.
Previous immigrations did not exceed one per cent over fifty years. This turnaround in population has inevitably changed its ethnic composition.
Over the last 20 years, the white British population has decreased slightly while the number of ethnic minority Britons has doubled.
Looking ahead to the next 10 years, the white ethnic group will remain static while the number of Asian non-dependents alone will increase from 1.5 to 2.5 million.
I’ve heard this before and it makes me sad each time. What’s Britain going to be without the British?
On a similar note:
Million whites leave SA - study
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1712536/posts
Good point. I've ragged on Britain before but it's only out of love since I feel a kinship with them because of a British mom. I'm sorry what is happening to Britain just as I'm sorry the way the U.S. is headed, but we do need to be careful what we say. Britain still has some good sensible folks left and some of them inhabit FR.
As long as they don’t come to the US with their socialist (Democrat) voting habits.
It's very difficult for a Briton to emigrate to the US. The main ways are via marriage or via a H1B visa, most of which are locked up by Indians.
Well that’s probably because Britons can’t apply for the Greencard lottery, not all are qualified to come here as workers, especially if retired, and not all have relatives who can get them here on chain immigration.
Immigration’s flip side
The British have always been susceptible to wanderlust, a trait that helped create an empire and has given the globe its common tongue. Even today, we remain the most dispersed nationality on the planet.
There are 41 countries where at least 10,000 Britons reside and a further 71 with British communities of more than 1,000 souls.
Yet, if emigration has been part of our way of life for centuries, it has rarely been on such a scale as today. New figures from the Office for National Statistics show that more than 200,000 UK citizens emigrated last year, the biggest outflow of nationals since before the First World War.
Why the exodus? There is little hard evidence, but much that is anecdotal, to account for the figure. There is the traditional lure of a better life, higher wages, lower living costs, more sunshine and, increasingly, the desire to make permanent the lifestyle enjoyed in a holiday home. Cheap air travel makes living in a distant land not quite the leap into the unknown that it was even a few decades ago.
Increasingly, too, people are leaving these shores not to earn money but to spend it – the number of retired Britons living overseas, where their pensions go further, appears to be climbing inexorably.
That’s the pull – what about the push? For it is also clear that people would not be departing on this scale if they did not find life in this country unsatisfactory. High taxes, intrusive government, unsafe streets, dirty hospitals, a coarseness of society that is squeezing out the old-fashioned virtues of courtesy and consideration – expats everywhere cite these aspects of life in modern Britain to justify their escape.
Yet none of these ills prevents this country remaining the most astonishing magnet for people. Last year, 510,000 foreigners came to live here, taking to 3.9 million the total since Labour came to power, the largest prolonged wave of immigration in our history.
It is when these two trends are set alongside each other that we see the profound implications. Put simply, as more and more UK nationals leave and more and more foreign nationals arrive, it is inevitable that the nature of this country, its society and its culture, will change.
Many will welcome the change and the diversity it brings. For centuries we have welcomed newcomers (though never on this scale) and they have contributed to the richness of British society and its wealth. But others will be alarmed by this “churn” of population, worried by its speed and scale and the way it is transforming our way of life.
These are big issues that are only now, belatedly, being addressed by politicians, notably by David Cameron with his call for a grown-up debate on population management. They have clear implications, too, for Gordon Brown’s quest to identify that elusive thing, Britishness.
Most of all, they should lead us all to question why, when we have never been more prosperous, so many Britons no longer find this country such an agreeable place in which to live.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/11/16/dl1601.xml
What is the green card lottery? Someone mentioned this to me Friday afternoon.
Green cards are the permanent US work and residence visas.
There are different classifications. Skilled workers, academics etc. can apply for them and if they are having needed skills they can come to the US easily. Additionaly to this there is a lottery each year, where 50000 applications, from millions coming from around the world, are drawn and if fulfilling several requirements they can apply for a permanent residence and work visa in the US. The idea behind this lottery is “diversity”, which means that each country has a special quota of applicants to be drawn. The State Department wants to balance the immigration coming from mainly Mexico, East Asia and India these days. Britons however are excluded from the lottery, because there are already many British origin Americans. French, Germans, Polish etc. however are permitted.
Okay, I know a lady from South Africa over here and she’s having immigration problems. She’s about to give up and head back to SA. She mentioned the green card lottery to me on Friday and before I could ask her about it, the conversation went somewhere else. Do you know if the South Africans are excluded or is just the British?
Not eligible are:
BRAZIL, CANADA, CHINA, COLOMBIA, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC,
ECUADOR, EL SALVADOR, GUATEMALA, HAITI, INDIA, JAMAICA, MEXICO, PAKISTAN,
PHILIPPINES, PERU, POLAND, RUSSIA, SOUTH KOREA, UNITED KINGDOM(except Northern Ireland) and its dependent territories, and VIETNAM.
This means that the lady you mentioned is permitted to apply for the lottery.
BTW I mistakenly said in my previous post that Poles are permitted, apparently they aren’t this year.
Note that the list of barred countries can change each year, although most of listed countries remain the same all the time.
Thanks for your information.
Remember those old black&white films in school that showed an animated shadow creeping across Europe representing the German advances during WWII?
That is Islam (ably assisted by the worst sort of cowards).
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