UK Sees Big Drop in the Arrival of Asylum Seekers

The amount of asylum seekers that are arriving in Britain has fallen very sharply, according to some official figures that were just released last Friday. The report, which was done by the Home Office said that there were 4,765 applications for asylum in the final three months of last year. This is a 30 percent fall on the 6.778 applications made in the same period the previous year.

However, the number of asylum seeker leaving the UK is also down by 3 percent. 16,3409 asylum seekers departed in the last quarter of 2009. This goes for asylum seekers that either left voluntarily or through enforced removal. Of course, this number is being compared to the 16,820 that left in 2008. There was an 8 percent fall to 2,605 in the number of asylum seekers leaving and a 2 percent drop to 13,735 in the number of people departing in non-asylum cases.

Pretty much, the number of visas issued was also up 16 percent from 364,060 to 423,595. The number of applications for British citizenship was up 30 percent to 51,315. On top of all this, the number of people who were granted UK passports was up 15 percent overall to 44,870.

There was a fall in the number of workers from Poland that were given permission to work in the UK. This was to help offset the sharp rise in the number of people coming in from the Baltic states of Latvia and Lithuania.

As anyone in the UK can say right now, emigration is a very hot topic. People are worried about giving up jobs to people coming from overseas. This fear has just increased ever since the economy took a turn for the worst.