London, May 14 (Inditop.com) Britain saw a rise of over three million people, a majority of them immigrants, during the 13 years of the Labour party regime, a development that led new Prime Minister David Cameron to promise a cap on non-EU immigration.
The majority of these three million – around 70 percent – are immigrants, direct arrivals or children born to them, the Office for National Statistics said in its report Thursday.
The population of Britain, at present, is estimated at 61,398,000 – 15,000 higher than the official estimate of 61,383,000. This includes over 1.5 million Indians, 740,000 Pakistanis and 280,000 Bangladeshi citizens.
But experts are of the opinion that the figure could be doubtful because of the failure to estimate how many migrants came into the country illegally.
“These figures confirm the large influence of immigration on our population. What is more, immigration will add over a million to the present population every five years,” Alan Green, of think tank Migration Watch, was quoted as saying by Daily Mail.
A Migration Watch estimate said there were at least 1.1 million illegal immigrants in the country.
The number of immigrants arriving in Britain increased by 3,084,200 since 1997, which has led experts to believe that the estimated population of 70 million could be reached well ahead of the current estimate of 2029.
In the first 11 years after Tony Blair became prime minister in 1997, the population went up by 3,084,200.
The coalition government said in policy statement Wednesday that there should be an “annual limit on the number of non-EU economic migrants admitted into the UK to live and work”.
The Labour party had, as part of its policy, a system which allowed highly-qualified migrants from outside the EU.
Under Labour, there has been a continuous rise in the number of people arriving from around the world, supplemented by a leap in asylum seekers in the late 1990s and influx of more than a million eastern Europeans after 2004, the think tank said.
The only method of counting the number of immigrants was “landing cards”, which non-EU migrants had to fill in after arrival at British ports and airports. The Labour government, however, scrapped the rule in 1998.
