This article was last updated on April 16, 2022
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Recently published official figures suggest that the number of Romanians and Bulgarians working in Britain have dropped since restrictions on immigration were lifted.
According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), a total of 140,000 Romanians and Bulgarians were employed in the U.K. in the first quarter of 2014 between January and March after access restrictions to the labour market for the two European countries were lifted, which is comparably 4,000 less than the last quarter of 2013.
But in contrast to the first three months of year 2013, the numbers have risen by 28,000, when 112,000 Bulgarians and Romanians were employed in Britain.
The first proper statistical release on immigration from Romania and Bulgaria rejected the predictions of a mass influx of immigrants from both countries.
Meanwhile, the government has not revealed the number of new arrivals since the lifting of the temporary restrictions placed on Romanian and Bulgarian migrants when they joined the European Union in 2007.
Pressure group Migration Watch had estimated around 50,000 new arrivals annually from the two countries and the U.K. Independence Party predicted large numbers of new immigrants.
The Liberal Democrat chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander has said the latest figures “gives the lie to UKIP’s scaremongering on immigration”.
Mr Alexander has added: “The very modest numbers of Romanians and Bulgarians coming to work in Britain this year is in stark contrast to the inflammatory rhetoric of earlier this year.”
The UKIP leader Nigel Farage has said the numbers represented a “huge increase” in the number of foreign workers coming into Britain, and pointed out that the data does not show include the dependants of foreign workers or those migrants who are unemployed.
The senior researcher at the Oxford-based Migration Observatory, Carlos Vargas-Silva has cautioned against drawing any immediate conclusions from incomplete immigration data and asked to wait until full statistics for 2014 can be obtained to see the full impact of end of restrictions.
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