London, Aug.20 (ANI): New figures show that the number of foreign workers in Britain has risen dramatically under the New Labour, with nearly 300,000 people coming from overseas to work here in the past year. According to The Telegraph, this is the biggest annual influx of foreign workers into Britain since the Government started to keep count a decade ago.
The Tories said this exposed Prime Minister Gordon Browns claims that he was backing a policy of finding British jobs for British workers.
The number of foreigners in the workforce is set to rise further on Wednesday when the Home Office publishes a blizzard of immigration statistics about asylum deportations and how many immigrants have come here from Eastern Europe.
Figures from the Department for Work and Pensions show that the number of foreigners over the age of 16 working in Britain was 2.29 million at the end of March, 270,000 more than the same time last year.
The rise is three times more than the annual increase 10 years ago shortly after Labour won the 1997 election.
Ninety thousand of the 270,000 came here from outside the European Union - meaning that many would have fallen foul of tough new immigration rules, which are being introduced by the Home Office.
The influx of foreign workers to the UK came weeks ahead of beginning of the Government’’s much vaunted new points based immigration system which should cap the number of visitors to the UK.
Whitehall documents seen by The Daily Telegraph show that if the new points based system had been introduced last year, 20,000 foreigners would have been barred from entering the country.
Last night a spokesman for the Home Office said: “We have listened to the public’’s concerns about immigration and we”re now delivering the biggest shake-up to Britain’’s border security for 40 years. (ANI)