London, Nov 5 : The immigrant workforce in Britain may soon take over the number of British-born employees, if the former continues to grow at the same pace in the country.

According to a survey conducted by the Office for National Statistics, foreign-born workers are taking hundreds of thousands of jobs each year previously filled by the local employees.

The survey figures revealed that in the past five years, the immigrant workforce has grown by almost a million, while the number of native-born workers has plummeted by around half a million.

That means immigrants have accounted not only for every additional job created but also for huge numbers of jobs, which used to be done by native-born workers, the Daily Mail reported.

The shift to foreign-born workers has accelerated in the three years since the European Union expansion gave millions of Eastern Europeans the right to settle and work here.

As a result, the native-born workforce is shrinking at a rate of more than a quarter of a million each year, while the number of immigrant workers is fast growing.

The survey comes at a time when a chaos over immigration figures, in which senior ministers had to admit that the impact of mass immigration has been far more dramatic than previously acknowledged, had surfaced.

The statistics show that in the 10 years since Labour came to power, more than 80 per cent of new jobs have gone to foreign workers- a far higher proportion than ministers admitted last week.

Since 1997, the number of adults in work has risen by 1.7million.

The growth of the immigrant workforce accounts for 1.35 million of the new jobs whereas the number of native-born Britons in work rose by just 310,000 - fewer than one in five, the daily said.

The picture is far starker in the past five years. Since 2002, Britain's workforce has grown by 491,000 to 27.2million.

Yet the number of those with jobs who were born in Britain fell by almost the same number - down 478,000, dipping below 24 million. Over the same period the number of foreigners working soared by 964,000 to nearly 3.3 million-- up 42 per cent.

Pointing out that figures revealed that all additional jobs created in the past five years have gone to immigrants, who have also taken over half a million jobs previously done by native Britons, the study says the trend is accelerating rapidly.

"These are surprising numbers,” Sir Andrew Green, of the MigrationWatch think-tank, said while reacting to the survey figures.

“They seem to contradict directly Government claims that immigrants are not taking British jobs,” he added. (ANI)