Who’s leaving the UK

Anyone who’s lived in London or visited over the years will know how the demographics of the city have changed and still are changing through immigration. What happens to the people who were there before the immigrants moved in. Well there’s an interesting report come out from the Institute for Public Policy Research detailing how many of them have gone the other way and emigrated themselves. The report called Brits Abroad: Mapping the scale and nature of British emigration says 5.5million British people, 9.2% of the population now live permanently overseas.

The top ten destinations, where 75% of British emigrants have gone to, are 1.Australia, 2.Spain, 3.USA, 4.Canada, 5.Ireland, 6.New Zealand, 7.South Africa, 8.France, 9.Germany and 10.Cyprus. The report highlighted four key reasons people left, Family Ties, Lifestyle, Overseas Adventure and Work. I’m taking lifestyle to mean long working hours, an oppressive tax burden, gridlocked traffic, rising crime and lousy weather. 50% of people surveyed abroad said they wouldn’t swap their current lifestyle and climate for the UK.

The IPPR predicts the trend will continue and that over 1million more Britons will leave in the next five years. The strong Pound and the staggering house prices in the UK mean people can sell up now and make a killing overseas. Once they’ve gone its very hard for them to buy back in because prices have inflated even more.

A couple of interesting facts from the report, there are at the moment 2351 British people in foreign jails and in 2005 46 Brits applied for asylum in the US. Amazingly 8 got it. What’s the magic thing you have to say to get a Green Card.