By Venkata Vemuri, IANS,
London: Non-British migrant workers are, on an average, taking up one out of four jobs in the country while in capital London, there are areas where they hold seven out of every 10 jobs, official figures show.
The most startling figures, based on information from the Office for National Statistics, relate to Newham – the East London borough hosting the 2012 Olympics. Here, almost seven in every 10 jobs are filled by workers who were not born in Britain – or 65,100 out of 93,700 posts, The Daily Mail reports. Many of the jobs are on the Olympic site itself.
The number of British-born people in Newham, who are not in work, is 25,600. This is a combination of the unemployed and those classed as ‘economically inactive’, such as students and the long-term sick.
In five other London council areas – Brent, Westminster, Harrow, Ealing and Kensington and Chelsea – the non-British work force ranges between 50.9 percent and 57.7 percent of the total workers.
There are nine council areas with 40 percent and above workers from outside Britain, 13 areas with 30 percent and above non-British workers, while they hold 20 percent of the jobs in 22 other council areas of London.
Outside London, the areas where the biggest proportion of jobs are taken by immigrants are Slough, Leicester, Luton, Reading, Cambridge, Manchester and Oxford. Crawley, in West Sussex, and Elmbridge, in Surrey, are also at the top of the list, the newspaper says.
Of course, many overseas workers in places such as Slough and Reading are Eastern Europeans who do not need work permits.
The area with the smallest proportion of foreign-born workers is Newark and Sherwood, in Nottinghamshire, at 1.5 percent.
MigrationWatch spokesperson Alp Mehmet told the newspaper: “Where there are gaps in the UK labour market, we should be filling them from the UK population. There is a laxness and a looseness about the way people are allowed in. What we want is closer control.”
(Venkata Vemuri can be contacted at [email protected])