The following text is from the BBC website so no one can call this a biased source. (and I apologise for this being such a long post but atleast read most of it please lol)

1,425,000 migrants in two years?

When a senior official told MPs he did not have the "faintest idea" how many illegal immigrants there were in the UK it plunged an already battered Home Office into fresh crisis back in May.

Anyone trying to find the answer to that question in the small forest of immigration statistics released by the government on Tuesday will search in vain.

What they should be able to do, however, is work out how many legal immigrants have come to the UK - although, even here, the figures are open to debate and interpretation.

Close study of the plethora of figures - which cover slightly different time spans and may overlap - suggests more than 1.4m non-British people were given the right to live and/or work in the UK in the two years since May 2004.

Of that total, 427,000 were people registering to work from the eight former Eastern Bloc countries which joined the EU in 2004, with the majority coming from Poland.

Add to that the number of self-employed people from those countries - and here we have to take a Home Office minister's estimate rather than official figures - then the total from the eight former Eastern Bloc states reaches "about 600,000".

There are no figures for the number of children or spouses accompanying the self-employed, but we do know that the 427,000 registered workers brought with them 36,000 dependants.

That brings the total of people given the right to live and/or work in the UK from the new EU member countries to 636,000 since May 2004.

Over the same period, migration from outside the EU also reached record levels, something largely overlooked in the coverage of the accession states.

Some 318,330 people were granted the right to settle in the UK in 2005 and 2004 from non-EU countries, according to Tuesday's figures

The largest increase was in people coming from Africa, which contributed 54,080 new arrivals in 2005 and 39,430 in 2004.

There were also significant increases in people coming from the Indian sub-continent, which contributed 24,235 in 2004 and 28,990 in 2005, and the Middle East, which contributed 9,395 people in 2005, up from 6,045 in 2004.

Immigration from European countries currently outside the EU, such as Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania and the former Soviet Union, also went up over the two year period, to 20,810 in 2005.

Migration from the Americas stayed relatively static.

While many of the people granted right of settlement may have already been in the UK for at least four years, the figure is symbolically important as it represents a more permanent relationship with the country.

If you then factor in people granted permanent settlement under the asylum system in 2004 and 2005, which adds up to 123,000, the total tops a million, although many of those granted asylum may be included in the permanent settlement figures quoted above.

The 1,425,000 figure comes once the 261,235 people from outside the EU who were granted work permits over the two year period - and their 87,000 dependants - are added.

This figure does not include people from the existing EU countries - say Ireland, France, Germany etc - who may have moved to live in the UK over those two years. And by definition it does not include illegal immigrants.

Having said all that this does not mean, of course, that the UK's population will have increased by this amount since May 2004, as there have also been people leaving the UK.

For example, 119,000 British people moved abroad in 2004, according to the latest available figures.

Mark Boleat, chairman of the Association of Labour Providers, which represents food processors and gang masters, said the workers registration scheme was not an accurate way of measuring the impact of accession on the British labour market.

"The figures are precise in that they show the number of people who have registered but they don't really tell us how many workers have come to Britain.

"Still less do they tell us how many are in the country. Many workers are not required to register because they are self-employed or they work for less than a month and the figures simply record the people coming in, not those going out.

"And, in addition, we know that many workers have simply not registered."

What is certain is that the government grossly underestimated the number of people who would want to come to the UK in search of work when the eight accession countries joined the EU in 2004.

The government originally backed estimates suggesting up to 13,000 a year, rather than the 214,000 a year who have done so.

Ministers also point to the fact that about 700 new EU migrants are claiming unemployment benefits.

But critics of the government's policy, such as former minister Frank Field, say migration is harming the indigenous population's employment prospects and is unsustainable at its current level.

Bus drivers and newly qualified nurses, for example, are finding it harder to get jobs because employers are bringing in cheap labour from Poland and other countries, he argues.

"It is becoming more difficult for local people to get jobs at a time when the number of jobs is increasing," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

It is no coincidence, he adds, that unemployment has been steadily climbing over the past 18 months and is poised to top the politically sensitive one million mark.

Even Frank Field admits the evidence migration is harming the British economy and jobs market is largely anecdotal at the moment.

The Office for National Statistics has also argued that better figures are needed on the number of migrant workers around the UK - something that would help the authorities plan the provision of extra services such as health and education.

Clearly this is more than enough to show labour will only continue to fail;I mean look at their predictions for the number of immigrants and they've no idea of how many illegal immigrants there are in the country & what's worse is that in the text it shows that one of their officials is unhappy with what's happening, on numerous occasions I've heard about the labour party virtually collapsing within it's ranks because they cannot agree with each other so it's no wonder the country is in so much turmoil and I think labour have really f**ked up their chances of a victory, I think the conservatives will win the next election but unfortunatly I reckon their approach will be very much the same. But going back to the subject of immigration, this is really disgusting, something desperately needs to be done. ENTER BNP