Brain Drain
The Telegraph reports a rather stunning statistic about Britain today that indicates that there is something going wrong there. It seems that 400,000 people emigrated from Britain last year - more than at any time in the past 50 years. About half of the total number leaving Britain moved to four countries, Australia, New Zealand, France and Spain. At the same time, about a half a million immigrants arrived in Britain. But her citizens are leaving in large numbers.
An exodus on this scale - amounting to one British citizen leaving the country every three minutes - has not been seen in the UK for almost 50 years.
Overall in 2006, there were a record 591,000 new arrivals. Only 14 per cent of these were Britons coming home.
It is the first time the number of foreign migrants has topped half a million and the statistics do not include hundreds of thousands of east Europeans who have arrived to work in Britain in the past two years. This is because most say they are coming for less than 12 months and do not show up as long-term immigrants.
The figures suggest that only one sixth of the immigrants were from the states which joined the EU in 2004.
The biggest influx was from the New Commonwealth - India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka - with more than 200,000 migrants.
Since Labour came to power in 1997, nearly four million foreign nationals have come to Britain and 1.6 million have left. Over the same period, 1.8 million Britons have left, but only 979,000 have returned.
I can't find the stats on US citizens emigrating, but I seem to remember news reports that emigration to Canada had reached a "record" number of something like 10,000. Britain is seriously hemorrhaging its population.
World news | Gaius Friday, 16 November , 2007
By tabitharuth, Friday, 16 November , 2007 @ 11:19 am
Shouldn’t that be haemorrhaging instead?
By martian, Friday, 16 November , 2007 @ 12:58 pm
And receiving transfusions from predominantly Muslim countries………………….
By feeblemind, Friday, 16 November , 2007 @ 1:52 pm
White flight on a national scale.
By sam, Friday, 16 November , 2007 @ 3:50 pm
I read the comments to this article and couldn’t believe the anger and sadness of the comments that former Britons had. The comments spoke mostly of the increasing encroachments of the gov’t into the lives and pocketbooks of its citizens, and the increasing crime and violence. It left me with a feeling of sadness about the future of England.