Figures released on Wednesday also showed that the number of people who listed Romania as their country of birth grew by 576 percent since the previous census, from 80,000 in 2011 to 539,000 in 2021.
One in six, or 10 million (16.8 percent), residents of England and Wales were born outside the UK on Census Day, March 21, 2021, an increase from 7.5 million (13.4 percent) in 2011.
India remained the most common country of birth outside the UK in 2021 with more than 900,000 residents.
London has remained the region with both the largest proportion of people born outside the UK and the largest proportion of people with non-UK passports. In 2021, more than 4 in 10 (40.6 percent) residents in London were non-UK born, and more than one in five (23.3 percent) had a non-UK passport.
Alp Mehmet, the chairman of the Migration Watch think tank, called the pace of change “unsustainable.”
‘Astonishing Figures’
“These astonishing figures confirm that the number of overseas-born in the population of England and Wales has more than doubled to ten million since 2001,” said Mehmet.“The high and uncontrolled level of immigration has meant young people struggling to get onto the housing ladder, worsening strains on the NHS and the irrevocable loss of green space,” he added.
“Furthermore, as the former ‘integration czar’ Baroness Casey noted, high immigration has meant parts of the UK changing out of all recognition over a very short space of time. The pace of change is unsustainable. Successful cohesion while this level of immigration continues is impossible,” he said.
In 2013, Migration Watch predicted that about 50,000 people from Romania and Bulgaria would come to the UK every year after both countries got unrestricted access to the UK’s labour market in 2014. Free movement ended when the UK left the EU on Jan. 31, 2020.
Census Deputy Director Jon Wroth-Smith said that the census “paints a picture of how the make-up of the population has changed in the past decade.”
“That decade, of course, saw us leave the EU as well as live with the pandemic,” he added.
“While these events may have had an impact on people’s decisions or ability to migrate or travel at a given time, the census tells us about the change over the whole decade—who was living here in March 2021, compared with March 2011. We can see Romanians have been a big driver in this change, while there have also been increases due to migration from India, Pakistan, and Poland, as well as southern European countries such as Italy,” said Wroth-Smith.
“We can also see that migration in the year prior to census was lower in 2021 than it was in 2011. This is likely, in large part, due to the various travel restrictions in place during the coronavirus pandemic,” he added.
The prime minister’s official spokesman said, “The UK has always been a diverse country and we celebrate that.”
