Both legal and illegal immigration put pressure on the country
According to the UK’s Office for Statistics (ONS) report, 606,000 people settled in Great Britain in the last calendar year, up by 118,000 from the previous year. When calculated over a period of twelve months, net immigration to Great Britain had never reached this level.
According to the data, 1.16 million people moved to Great Britain from abroad in 2022, while 557 thousand left for the purpose of permanent emigration. The Office for National Statistics also showed that 151,000 new immigrants came from the European Union, while 202,000 EU citizens left, so the number of EU citizens living in Great Britain decreased by a net 51,000 last year.
Most of them, 925 thousand, came from countries outside the European Union. The number of people moving to Great Britain from outside the European Union has risen by 287,000 in one year, according to an ONS report on Thursday. According to the Statistics Office, most immigrants from outside the European Union come to work in Great Britain.
British professional organizations have long warned the government that the main cause of the labor shortage is the ongoing migration of EU workers due to Brexit. Only those EU citizens who have settled in the country legally and according to their lifestyle by the end of 2020 can remain in Great Britain, retaining all their rights acquired before Brexit, but they must also apply for an indefinite residence permit – the official Legal name for settled status in the European Union. According to the latest statistics of the Ministry of the Interior in London, which were presented on Thursday, the British authorities had received 7.22 million of these requests by the end of the first quarter of this year.
At the top of the list are Romanian citizens with 1.48 million applications. By the end of March, 174,910 Hungarians living in Great Britain had applied for settled status from the UK Home Office.
Meanwhile, illegal immigration is also causing a serious headache for the government, which is trying to tighten laws in order to reduce the pressure on the country to some extent. According to Britain’s Home Office, 45,000 illegal immigrants crossed by boat from France into the UK last year alone, nearly double the number in the previous year. Boats around Calais cross the narrowest point of the canal and usually land near Dover. Locals suspect that tougher immigration rules will stem the tide.
