'EU migrant risks’ Romanians are EIGHT times more likely to be jailed as Britons

Of the 126,000 Romanians living in Britain, 760 are in prison, according to the Ministry of Justice.

By contrast of the 617,000 Poles living in the UK, only 573 are in jail. One prisoner in eight is a foreign national – a proportion that has doubled in the 10 years since mass immigration from eastern Europe.

The latest statistics cover the period from October 2013 to March 2014, during which restrictions were lifted on Romanian and Bulgarian migrants.

A breakdown of the figures for jails in England and Wales show that Romanians, Albanians and Lithuanians are all proportionately more likely to be jailed than native Britons. Tory MP Philip Davies, who obtained the figures, called them “staggering and unacceptable”.

He said: “This lays bare that free movement in the EU also means free movement of criminals. We are unnecessarily opening our borders to lots of people to commit crimes, who create unnecessary victims of crime in the UK. That is why we would be better off outside the EU.”

Lord Green, the chairman of Migration Watch, added: “These statistics strengthen the case for tightening the arrangements within the EU for the removal of convicted criminals to their country of origin.”

The majority of prisoners are British – 34,168 out of a jail population of 39,773. The most likely foreigners to be jailed were Vietnamese or Albanians with more than one per cent of their populations in prison. Separate data from police forces shows that 11,000 Romanians are arrested each year, most for shoplifting.

The figure represents two percent of all arrests even though Romanians make up only 0.2 per cent of the population.

In December last year, Romanian Constantin Alexandroaia, 33, was jailed for blowing up three cash machines in the Midlands by forcing explosive gas into them and stealing £27,000. They were the first raids of their kind in the UK.