Eurozone crisis ‘pushing migrants to UK’

The Eurozone jobs crisis is encouraging more southern European migrants to head

.to the UK to join those from the east, the Migration Observatory has said

Over the past five years the number of EU nationals living in the UK has gone up by almost 700,000 to 3.3 million

.The report said 49% of the 700,000 were from Poland and Romania, but Spain, Italy and Portugal accounted for 24%

.The Migration Observatory says there is no single “pull factor” but a mixture, including wages and economic prospects

.Just over 70% of EU citizens coming to live in the UK for at least a year say they are coming to work, with more than half of them already having a job to start

.The research team at Oxford University said it had tried to identify the domestic and international triggers behind migration from the EU over the past five years

.While the UK had experienced huge movements from Eastern Europe, particularly from Poland, southern Europeans were now looking for work in the UK to avoid the economic crisis at home

.An analysis of official figures shows six countries provided almost half of all EU nationals in the UK – Poland, Romania, Spain, Italy, Hungary and Portugal

.The number of people from those six nations living in the UK had gone up by more than 500,000 between 2011 and 2015. During the same period, Spain, Italy and Portugal together had lost almost a million jobs