Germany attracts far more EU migrants than UK, says report

Eastern Europeans form 1 per cent of the United Kingdom's population and are better educated than locals, but the majority of European Union citizens migrating to other EU states prefer to go to Germany than Britain, according to a new report.

The publication of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development's International Migration Outlook 2014 comes just days after British prime minister David Cameron unveiled plans to cut welfare benefits to low-paid foreign workers to discourage them from coming to the UK.

Nearly five million foreign nationals now live in the UK. In all, they number 7.9 per cent of the population, a far lower share than is generally claimed by those concerned about immigration. The figures, for 2013, show that more than a quarter of the foreign nationals living in the UK are from the ten eastern European states that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007. Half of these come from Poland.

Despite the UK’s increasingly anxious debate about immigration, the OECD numbers show that nearly 30 per cent of migrants moving from one EU state to another under free movement rules go to Germany. Just 7 per cent go to the UK.

Last year, immigration to Germany, which has a rapidly-ageing population, rose to 450,000 people, the fourth year in a row in which numbers have gone up. Three-quarters of all of its immigrants are arriving from other EU states.

Launching the report in Paris, OECD secretary general Angel Gurría said: “Countries would benefit more from immigration if they considered migrants as a resource rather than a problem.”

British-born young people are more likely to be without a job than their foreign-born peers. Nearly half of all eastern European immigrants to the UK have university degrees, compared with just a third of the native population, according to the report. "Today's migrants are better educated than their predecessors," said the OECD's Stefano Scarpetta.

The UK has taken in more people than have left the country every year since 1994. Last year, 260,000 more moved to the UK than left.