The United Kingdom (UK) has a long history of receiving large numbers of migrant workers. In particular, successive cohorts of immigrants from former Commonwealth colonies, especially in the West Indies and the Indian sub-continent, started arriving at the end of the 1940s (Hatton and Wheatley Price 2005).
Over the last decade, however, the UK has also become one of the main destin- ation countries for immigrants from various parts of Europe. For example, data on Na- tional Insurance Numbers issued to overseas nationals (NINos) indicate that there was a five-fold increase in the number of “new” immigrant workers arriving in the UK from European countries between 2002 and 2007, rising from around 103,000 to over 500,0001. As a result, the percentage of NINo registrations made by Europeans almost doubled, rising from 33 per cent to 63 per cent over this period 2. Much of this increase can be explained by the migration that followed the enlargement of the European Union in May 2004, since the UK was one of only three member states at the time to open their border to migrant workers from the new member states in Central and Eastern Europe
a high proportion of EaP mi- grants are relatively well qualified. The switch to the PBS has focused attention in the UK on the types of high skilled migrants that the country needs to fill strategic skills gaps. STEM qualifications have been noted as a key area (Clarke 2011; George et al. 2012) and there is some evidence that the EaP countries may represent a source of STEM-qualified workers. UNESCO provides estimates of the subject of graduation of university graduates for a variety of countries and the data suggest that both Ukraine and Belarus have amongst the highest proportions of graduates in the world in the areas of “science, engineering, manufacturing and construction”