Mass immigration from the European Union is having a “disproportionate” impact on Britain and damaging social cohesion, a leaked government analysis has said.
The document states that citizens of other EU states are overwhelmingly the best performers in Britain’s jobs market, accounting for 75 per cent of the growth in the UK’s employment figures.
Eastern Europeans especially are taking low-skilled jobs and then having their income topped up by “generous in-work benefits, without having contributed, from Day One”.
The Daily Mail writes that this is undercutting wages and damaging the “social policy objectives” of getting low-skilled British people into employment.
The analysis for the Department for Work and Pensions also says that “unprecedented” levels of mass immigration from the EU are adding the equivalent of the city of Coventry to the UK population every single year.
“Net migration continues to rise at record levels and is now 336,000,” the report says, continuing:
“The biggest contributor is the increase in the long-term migration of EU citizens. This is equivalent to adding a new Coventry to the UK every year.
“‘Newly arriving EEA [European Economic Area] nationals have a disproportionate impact on the UK. Numbers in employment in the UK grew by nearly 450,000 in the last year. EEA nationals secured about three quarters of that growth in employment, compared to 25 per cent for UK nationals.”
Well-educated Eastern Europeans are also “over-represented in low-skilled sectors in the UK – in-work benefits can act as a subsidy for them to take and stay in these jobs, damaging UK social policy objectives”.
The report says that 60 per cent of Eastern European graduates in the UK end up in lower-skilled jobs, thus forcing out Britons who do not have similar qualifications.
In addition, more than £3.1 billion of the £27.2 billion of in-work benefits paid each year goes to nationals from the EEA, even though they represent only 6 per cent of the working-age population.
A DWP source said: “These are all facts that are already in the public domain.
“This is exactly why the PM has secured a deal to make sure EU migrants don’t get full access to benefits for four years.”