Germans 3rd Largest UK Immigrant Group

A study published Wednesday shows that Germans make up Britain's fourth largest immigrant group. The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) report, conducted at Sheffield University and published on the BBC Web site, revealed that more than half of Britain's population growth in the 1990s can be attributed to immigration. Between 1991 and 2001, the numbers of overseas-born people living in Britain, excluding Northern Ireland, increased from 5.75 to 7.53 percent of the overall population. Of the 1.1 million people who moved to Britain in the 1990s, 262,276 were born in Germany. It has been suggested, however, that a large portion of the German-born immigrants were children of the British army personnel stationed in Germany. The other three top birthplaces for British immigrants were Republic of Ireland (494,850), India (466,416) and Pakistan (320,767). Although the numbers suggest that the Germans make up the fourth-largest group, the IPPR study dubbed them third, excluding Irish immigrants from their ranking.