Foreign Population on the Rise in Britain

Mark Easton, the Home Editor of BBC News, has a Boxing Day tradition of posing a bunch of "family puzzlers," the answers to which most people are unlikely to know (he has a link to the answers, so you don't have to remain in ignorance). This year quite a few of those are drawn from the 2011 Census in the UK, and that drew my attention to a recent report of his focusing on rise in the foreign-born population in Britain between the 2001 and 2011. What percent of the population of England and Wales was foreign-born in 2011? The answer: 13 percent--pretty similar to the US. While the foreign-born population from India and Pakistan makes sense, the biggest increase was among people from Poland--with more than a half million arriving during the past decade, pushing Poles to second position among the foreign-born. The census also revealed that the proportion of the population in England and Wales describing themselves as both British and white dropped from 87 percent in 2001 to 80 percent in 2011. Still, they are the majority in every locality except London, where about one in three people is foreign-born and less than half identify as both British and white.