Hundreds of thousands of migrants are taking advantage of soft European Union rules to get jobs in Britain by the back door.

Foreign nationals from outside Europe who would struggle to secure a visa to work in the UK have instead got citizenship elsewhere in the EU.

Under Brussels regulations, they can then move to Britain and apply for employment.

A report has found that the number of EU passport-holders born elsewhere in the world - including Africa, Asia and South America - but now working in the UK had tripled in just a decade.

Foreign nationals from outside Europe who would struggle to secure a visa to work in the UK have instead got citizenship elsewhere in the EU

The University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory found that there were 78,000 non-Europeans with EU citizenship employed in Britain in 2004. But by the beginning of 2015, this had soared to 264,000.

The figures will be another painful blow for David Cameron who had pledged to get tough by reducing net migration – people coming in to the UK minus those leaving – to ‘tens of thousands’ a year only to see it hit nearly 300,000 in May.

Last night Lord Green of Deddington, chairman of MigrationWatch, which campaigns for managed migration, said: ‘It is significant that the numbers have almost trebled in ten years.

‘The issue of passports is the responsibility of the individual EU countries and these passports carry with them the full right to free movement.

‘It follows, therefore, that this increasing flow could become a back door to Britain. This development strengthens the case for finding some means of controlling access to the UK by EU migrants.’

The vast majority of EU citizens who were born outside Europe were given their passports in countries that joined the union before its enlargement to take in former Eastern Bloc nations in 2004.

Of those working in the UK, there were 54,000 from Portugal, 36,000 from Italy, 33,000 from France and 30,000 from Spain. The main countries of birth were India with 24,000, South Africa 15,000, US and Canada 14,000 and Brazil 13,000.

The analysis was compiled from data from the quarterly Labour Market Survey which is carried out by the Office for National Statistics.

The Migration Observatory said the increase in employment of those EU citizens who were born outside Europe reflected the surge of migrants to the UK from all over the EU.

Under New Labour, immigrants arrived in Britain at the rate of almost one every minute during the ‘open door’ years. The influx caused the foreign population to swell by 3.6million between 1997 and 2010.

It was also evidence of how a wave of EU immigration has taken advantage of Britain’s fast-recovering economy - which has produced an extra 2 million private sector jobs since 2010 - while the Eurozone remains mired in chaos.

The share of EU citizens living in the UK who were born outside Europe is 9 per cent.

Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory, said: ‘British citizens can live and work in other EU countries, whether they were born in the UK or not. Citizens of other EU counties have the same rights in the UK.’

The Migration Observatory said the increase in employment of those EU citizens who were born outside Europe reflected the surge of migrants to the UK from all over the EU.

Last year a damning report by an immigration watchdog found immigrants were exploiting lax EU rules to bring their families and spouses to Britain.

The Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration found that foreign nationals from outside Europe who would be unlikely to gain a visa to live in the UK were applying for passports elsewhere in the EU.

It found that more than a third of Western European nationals - 36 per cent - who were applying for citizenship for their partner were born in Africa, Asia or South America and had gained European citizenship before arriving in Britain.

In a quarter of cases the ‘sponsors’ - whose new nationalities included German, Italian and Spanish - were born in the same non-EU country as their partner.

Some 60 per cent of those applying for citizenship for a so-called spouse last year failed because immigration officials feared the relationship was fake - but thousands still slip through the net.



