February 27, 2008 - By Simon Bennett

The massive influx of eastern European immigrant workers to Britain has topped 800,000 in the four years since Poland and seven other former communist states joined the European Union.

In the last 12 months the cost of paying benefits to the newcomers has more than doubled to an estimated £170million a year, with 145,000 immigrants now claiming state handouts.
The Government predicted 13,000 arrivals a year when opting to open Britain’s labour markets to millions of new EU citizens – while most other countries imposed restrictions.
But the scale of immigration has proved to be 15 times greater.

In 2007 another 214,510 eastern Europeans registered to work in Britain, equal to 600 arrivals a day.

Yesterday UK business leaders said employers would continue to welcome the new arrivals because their work ethic is “so much better than domestic workers” who suffer from a “skills shortage and increasing welfare dependency”.

The figures published yesterday do not include self-employed eastern Europeans such as plumbers or builders, or 30,000 from Romania and Bulgaria which joined the EU later, meaning that the real total of new arrivals is likely to be well over a million in four years – equivalent to a city the size of Birmingham.

Eastern European immigrants can claim benefits after working here for 12 months – including child benefit for children who have stayed with relatives back in their home countries.

More here: here .