More than 60,000 Eastern Europeans register to work in Scotland in four years

Published on Wednesday 30 April 2008 13:18

MORE than 60,000 Eastern European immigrants have registered to work in Scotland over the last four years, a new report said today.

The figures, published by the think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), showed around a million people had arrived in Britain from countries including Poland, the Czech Republic and Estonia since 2004.

But some 500,000 migrants have since left the UK. Scotland was named as one of the areas that had drawn a “significant proportion” of immigrants since the enlargement of the European Union. The number of immigrants registering to work in Scotland between 2004 and 2007 was 62,440.

And the study also found more people had registered for employment in food, fish and meat processing in Scotland than anywhere else in the UK. Eight countries became members of the EU in May 2004 – Poland, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Bulgaria and Romania acceded in 2007.

According to the study, there were 665,000 nationals from all ten countries living in the UK in the last quarter of 2007.

That was an increase of 548,000 since the first quarter of 2004. The IPPR predicted that rapid economic development in the EU states would mean fewer people coming to Britain over the next few years.