UK Immigration News

On Sunday 18th August 2013, David Miranda, a Brazilian citizen was travelling from Germany to Brazil. He took a connecting flight to Heathrow where he was due to fly on to Rio de Janeiro. At Heathrow, he was detained by UK law enforcement officers for nine hours under anti-terrorism law.

Figures released by the UK's Office for National Statistics show that there are now 1.3m British graduates living and working overseas. This is more than any other developed country. Germany comes second with a mere 865,000. Only 400,000 US graduates live abroad even though the population of the US is about 5.5 times that of the UK.

The UK's opposition immigration spokesman has been forced to withdraw claims that British firms Next and Tesco used cheaper foreign workers at the expense of UK-born workers.

Chris Bryant, the Labour opposition's shadow immigration minister made a speech on August 10th 2013. He had been intending to use the speech to criticise British firms for their failure to employ British workers.

The director general of the Institute of Directors, Simon Walker, has said that immigrant workers are vital for the UK's economy. Mr Walker was responding to a speech by the opposition Labour Party's immigration spokesman, Chris Bryant.

Mr Bryant made a speech on Tuesday 12th August 2013 in which he bemoaned the fact that over 1m Britons aged under 24 were unemployed. In the original draft of the speech, he criticised large British employers like supermarket Tesco and clothes retailer Next for employing foreign workers to cut costs.

Charlie Mullins, the millionaire founder of London's Pimlico Plumbers, has said that there are so many immigrant workers in the UK because there are insufficient British workers to fill the available vacancies. He says 'To my mind, it is simply a supply and demand situation…There is not enough UK talent to fill the jobs which is creating opportunities for migrants'.

The UK's Office for National Statistics has released figures which show that the number of Romanians and Bulgarians working in the UK rose by 26% in the second quarter of 2013. There were 141,000 Bulgarians and Romanians working in the UK by June 2013 compared to 112,000 in March.