More than a third of Britain's foreign-born population is now from Europe

More than a third of Britain's foreign-born population is now from Europe

More than a third of all migrants living in Britain are now white Europeans – including over half a million Poles – a new government study has revealed.

Overall, there are 7.5 million people living in England and Wales who were born outside the UK – making up some 13 per cent of the population with another 8 percent born in the UK making the multicultural community more than 21 percent.

Before 1981, 485,000 migrants moved to the UK from the Indian sub-continent – more than twice the number of Europeans. Between 1981 and 2000. However, in the years after 2001 the number of migrants from the EU rocketed. Overall, around 1.5million migrants moved to the UK from Europe – compared to just 600,000 from south Asia.

Of the 2.1million migrants from Europe living in the UK, 528,000 are from Poland, 100,000 from Lithuania and 80,000 from Romania, an analysis of the 2011 census published this morning has revealed.

According to this week’s Office for National Statistics study – 94 per cent of the half a million Poles in the UK arrived between 2001 and 2011, following the country’s accession into the European Union.

Alongside eastern European migrants, there are also 130,000 migrants from France, 135,000 from Italy and 80,000 from Spain.

The wave of migration from the former Communist countries in Eastern Europe means the largest foreign ‘ethnic minority’ in the UK is now non-British or Irish ‘other white’.

More than two million people currently living in the UK were born in other European countries – with almost all identifying themselves as being ‘white’ but not British.

The majority of foreign-born migrants in Britain from Ireland and the Caribbean arrived in the period before 1981, the ONS said.

Meanwhile, almost half – 47 per cent – who identified as Bangladeshi arrived between 1981 and 2000, during a period of instability in the country following its war of independence in 1971 and the military coup in 1975, Some 95 per cent of Black Africans, meanwhile, arrived after 1981.