Population of immigrants in England and Wales jumps by THREE MILLION in 10 years as census shows more than one in eight people are foreign

The scale of mass immigration over the last decade was laid bare today when census data revealed that the immigrant population of England and Wales went up by 3million over the past decade.

In 2011, 7.5million residents were foreign-born, making up 13 per cent of the population - up from 4.6million people in 2001.

Another major change came in the decreasing number of Christians - 4million fewer people claimed to belong to the faith as a quarter of Britons said they had no religion.

There were 33.2million people claiming to be Christian, down from 37.3million in 2001 and making up just 59 per cent of the population.  25.1 per cent of people said they had no faith, up from 14.8 per cent a decade earlier, while the proportion of Muslims rose from 3.0 per cent to 4.8 per cent.

The third most popular religion was Hinduism, with 1.5 per cent of the population, while 0.8 per cent were Sikhs and 0.5 per cent Jewish.

The statistics emerged as the Archbishop of Canterbury claimed that English cathedral congregations had grown dramatically in recent years, debunking the 'cliché' that the Church of England is fading away.

The data on religion showed considerable national variation - Knowsley, in Lancashire, is the most Christian town in England with 80.9 per cent of residents following the faith, while in London's Tower Hamlets 34.5 per cent of the population are Muslims.

Norwich is the most godless place in the country, as 42.5 per cent said they had no religion - despite the presence of one of England's most spectacular cathedrals.

Britain's increasing diversity was emphasised by the data released by the Office of National Statistics, as it emerged that the proportion of the nation that is white has fallen below 90 per cent for the first time.

48.2million people described themselves as being white, making up 86.0 per cent of the population of England and Wales, down from 91.3 per cent a decade earlier.  7.5 per cent of the population is Asian, while 3.4 per cent described themselves as black.

Unsurprisingly, London was found to be the most ethnically diverse region, while Wales was the least.  London is also home to the most immigrants, as 37 per cent of its residents were born abroad and 24 per cent are not citizens of the UK.

One major reason for the explosion in the foreign-born population is the accession of 12 countries in central and eastern Europe to the EU, giving them the right to live and work in the UK - the population of Poles in England and Wales has grown nine-fold over the decade.

Apart from Poland, the other leading countries of origin for British immigrants were India, Pakistan, Ireland and Germany.

The largest increase in ethnic group over the last decade was seen in the 'White: Other' category where an increase of 1.1million was recorded. This reflects more than half a million Poles who migrated into England and Wales during these years, the ONS said.

Around 2million respondents listed their partners or fellow household members as being of different ethnic groups - 47 per cent more than in 2001.

There are now nearly as many Catholics as Protestants in Northern Ireland, it was revealed today.

According to last year's census, 48 per cent of population describe themselves as Protestant, while 45 per cent are Catholic.

In 2001, 53 per cent were Protestant and 44 per cent Catholic.

Almost half of the population described themselves as British when asked to choose from a list of identities.

A total of 48 per cent considered themselves British, while 29 per cent said they were Northern Irish and 28 per cent called themselves Irish.

Further data show some 4.8million people now hold a non-UK passport. Of these, 2.3million have EU passports.

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Mexican Migration May Be Over

I am not sure I agree with Michael Barone on this but it is an interesting POV

Is mass migration from Mexico to the United States a thing of the past?

At least for the moment, it is. Last May, the Pew Hispanic Center, in a study based on U.S. and Mexican statistics, reported that net migration from Mexico to this country had fallen to zero from 2005 to 2010.

Pew said 20,000 more people moved to Mexico from the United States than from there to here in those years. That's a vivid contrast with the years 1995 to 2000, when net inflow from Mexico was 2.2 million people.

Because there was net Mexican immigration until 2007, when the housing market collapsed and the Great Recession began, it seems clear that there was net outmigration from 2007 to 2010, and that likely has continued in 2011 and 2012.

There's a widespread assumption that Mexican migration will resume when the U.S. economy starts growing robustly again. But I think there's reason to doubt that will be the case.

Over the past few years, I have been working on a book, scheduled for publication next fall, on American migrations, internal and immigrant. What I've found is that over the years this country has been peopled in large part by surges of migration that have typically lasted just one or two generations.

Almost no one predicted that these surges of migration would occur, and almost no one predicted when they would end.

For example, when our immigration system was opened up in 1965, experts testified that we would not get many immigrants from Latin America or Asia. They assumed that immigrants would come mainly from Europe, as they had in the past.

Experts have also tended to assume that immigrants are motivated primarily by economic factors. And in the years starting in the 1980s, many people in Latin America and Asia, especially in Mexico, which has produced more than 60 percent of Latin American immigrants, saw opportunities to make a better living in this country.

But masses of people do not uproot themselves from familiar territory just to make marginal economic gains. They migrate to pursue dreams or escape nightmares.

Life in Mexico is not a nightmare for many these days. Beneath the headlines about killings in the drug wars, Mexico has become a predominantly middle-class country, as Jorge Castaneda notes in his recent book, "Manana Forever?" Its economy is growing faster than ours.

And the dreams that many Mexican immigrants pursued have been shattered.

You can see that if you look at the statistics on mortgage foreclosures, starting with the housing bust in 2007. More than half were in the four "sand states" -- California, Nevada, Arizona and Florida -- and within them, as the Pew Hispanic Center noted in a 2009 report, in areas with large numbers of Latino immigrants.

These were places where subprime mortgages were granted, with encouragement from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to many Latinos unqualified by traditional credit standards.

These new homeowners, many of them construction workers, dreamed of gaining hundreds of thousands of dollars as housing prices inevitably rose. Instead, they collapsed. My estimate is that one-third of those foreclosed on in these years were Latinos. Their dreams turned into nightmares.

We can see further evidence in last month's Pew Research report on the recent decline in U.S. birthrates. The biggest drop was among Mexican-born women, from 455,000 births in 2007 to 346,000 in 2010.

That's a 24 percent decline, compared with only a 6 percent decline among U.S.-born women. It's comparable to the sharp decline in U.S. birthrates in the Depression years from 1929 to 1933.

Beneath the cold statistics on foreclosures and births is a human story, a story of people whose personal lives have been deeply affected by economic developments over which they had no control and of which they had no warning.

Those events have prompted many to resort to, in Mitt Romney's chilly words, "self-deportation." And their experiences are likely to have reverberations for many others who have learned of their plight.

Surges of migration that have shaped the country sometimes end abruptly. The surge of Southern blacks to Northern cities lasted from 1940 to 1965 -- one generation. The surge of Mexicans into the U.S. lasted from 1982 to 2007 -- one generation.

The northward surge of American blacks has never resumed. I don't think the northward surge of Mexicans will, either.

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