Rate of migration reasonable: UK PM

British Prime Minister David Cameron admits that the rate of immigration from Romania and Bulgaria to the UK has remained “reasonable” since working restrictions were lifted at the beginning of the year.

“I think we can see, at the start of the year, so far there looks to be a reasonable level of migration,” Cameron told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday.

Hours later, however, the UK premier claimed that his estimates were not based on official figures but on what he had read and seen in the media.

The remarks come at a time that Cameron is under pressure from some Conservative backbench MPs to extend the now-expired labor restrictions on migrants from the two eastern European countries for a further five years.

When Romania and Bulgaria joined the European Union (EU) in 2007, Britain and several other countries imposed restrictions on the new members’ access to their labor markets. But the transitional controls were lifted on January 1, 2014, allowing citizens from the two countries to work without across the bloc.

Cameron also noted that it is impossible to extend the restrictions, which had once prevented Romanians and Bulgarians from coming to work in Britain.

“We extended the transitional controls from five years to seven years. Those seven years are now up. We are not allowed under the current rules to extend them further,” he said.

In recent months, several British media outlets and right-wing politicians have issued warnings about a possible influx of eastern European migrants to the UK in 2014 following the reversal of working restrictions on migrants from poor countries in the EU.