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Immigration rose to a record high of 650,000 during Theresa May’s last year as Home Secretary, official figures revealed today.

An unprecedented 284,000 EU citizens arrived in the UK amid a rush to beat the Brexit referendum in June.

At the same time, despite Government claims that immigration was increased by EU free movement rules, there were 289,000 non-Europeans who have no such rights.

The figure raises a question of whether Brexit can achieve the cuts expected by many Leave voters.

Net immigration was a near-record 335,000 over the period in which Mrs May was in charge of borders — just 1,000 short of the all-time peak of 336,000 recorded a year earlier.

The massive numbers revealed by the Office for National Statistics left in tatters the Government’s target to reduce net levels to the “tens of thousands”.

Downing Street insisted that the Prime Minister was still wedded to the target, saying: “She remains absolutely committed to bringing net immigration down to sustainable levels, which means tens of thousands, but we have made clear it will take time.”

New Ukip leader Paul Nuttall said: “These figures just go to show that you cannot trust the Tories to bring down immigration. This is an abject failure by the Prime Minister in particular.”

The record was fuelled by the highest ever influx of EU nationals in the 12 months before June’s referendum. For the first time there were more Romanians in the figures than people from any other EU nation.

That fact confirmed former Ukip chief Nigel Farage’s controversial prediction made when Romania achieved free movement rights in 2014.

Romanians accounted for 10 per cent of all immigration during 2015 — more than any other nationality.

The overall inflow of 650,000 — which included 77,000 returning Britons — was equivalent to roughly the population of two London boroughs.

It was countered by emigration totalling 315,000 — of which 95,000 were EU citizens.

The ONS’s head of migration statistics Nicola White said as the new data was unveiled: “Net migration remains around record levels. The inflow of EU citizens is at historically high levels.

“Immigration of Bulgarian and Romanian citizens continues the upward trend seen over the last few years and in 2015 Romania was the most common country of previous residence.”

There were rises in job-seeking workers from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, the Republic of Ireland, Spain and Sweden.

Some 189,000 Europeans came to Britain for work, of which 108,000 had a job offer.

China, which provided 44,000 immigrants during the same period, Poland, with a 38,000 tally, and India, with 36,000, were the next biggest contributors.

Asylum applications rose to 41,280 in the year to the end of September. Of these, 2,298 were Syrians.

In addition, 4,162 people were given humanitarian protection under the Syrian Vulnerable Person’s Resettlement Scheme.

Saira Grant, chief executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, accused the Government of creating “counter-productive immigration policies designed to make life extremely uncomfortable for migrants” driven by a “fixation on the ill-judged net migration target”.

Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, said quarterly net migration statistics have become “rather irrelevant in the current migration debate”, adding: “Brexit could mean a wholesale revision of UK migration policy, so current rules are little more than placeholder policies.”

Boris Johnson today denied reports that he told four ambassadors that he supported free movement rights.