The scale of European immigration in the UK

It looks like everybody forgot about Brexit and its aftermath. Coronavirus took over our media, our minds and our lives but in the background work on Brexit is still ongoing.

Government is preparing, negotiating teams working on documents and probably waiting for Mr Bernier and Mr Johnson recovery from Coronavirus. For many citizens of European countries living in the UK its perfect time to finish so-called “Settled status scheme” procedure.

For those who don’t know what’s that- a few words of explanation. Basically- every citizen of the EU country who want to live in the UK after Brexit day, have to download a mobile app, answer few questions on it, send a picture and… wait for the decision. It’s really hard to find anything about it in British media but newspapers in countries with a big population of emigrants (like Poland for example) this subject is widely discussed.

To be honest- we all know that big part of Brexit referendum result was unrestricted immigration. People in the UK were fed up with it. It’s hard not to agree with it- millions of additional people who never paid a pence into the system- use a free social security system, health system, education system and putting pressure on the housing market and job market. This is nothing to joke about. At the same time- immigrants work for lower wages so profit-hungry corporations do not hesitate to build whole factories and warehouses only for immigrant workers. As a resident of Shirebrook- I don’t have to point you where to look for example…

Labour politicians in metropolitan areas still claim that diversity is the strength of the UK and immigrants bring more then they taking away from the system. This is an obvious lie. You can easily find studies showing that from all ethnic minorities in the UK- only Poles pay into the system more than they take away. All other minorities- live off taxpayer money…

We all know that Poles are a big part of Shirebrook. How big? Only Labour-led Council know that but they keep all info to themself. All I can offer is data I found in the foreign press about applications to the “Settled status scheme”. Even though Poles are blamed for everything bad- you can easily see that they are not alone. Literally no one talks about immigrants from other countries but there are a lot of them.

There is still a year to register in “Settled status scheme” and many delays it, so the picture above shows only data up to end of January 2020. Only after the end of the scheme, we will know the real scale of European immigration in the UK. At this point, I can say- it’s way bigger than I thought it is. I’m shocked by how many Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese people live in the UK. It’s funny because most of the extreme right-wing hacks blame Poles for all immigration problems…

One last strange fact about this chart- if you look at the number of Latvians applying to live in the UK after Brexit and then check the population of this country you will see that about 5% of the overall population of Latvia live in the UK! It’s insane! If you realize that the majority of those people are young, you can understand how big a problem this immigration wave is for this country. Not only UK suffers because of Labour open door policy- nations of Eastern Europe lost hundreds of thousands of people in working age and this will have a negative impact on their markets for many decades to come.

Sylwester Zwierzynski info@shirebrook247.com