Large-scale immigration has damaged the poorest communities and deeply unsettled the country, Liam Byrne, the Immigration Minister, said today.

Mr Byrne says that inequality and child poverty are two of the main side-effects of migration, which has been running at record levels since Labour came to power.

The immigration minister, announcing that a points system of immigration would begin in UK next year, also highlighted the pressures caused by migration on schools and housing, and how they are affecting attempts to improve educational standards.

Mr Byrne made his remarks before publication tomorrow of official figures showing net migration of 185,000 in 2005, four times the figure when Labour came to power in 1997. He said that if Labour fails to address public concern about the level of immigration and its effects on the country and public services, it could lose the next general election.

Mr Byrne said the UK points system of immigration will be similar to that used by Australia, where potential immigrants are awarded points according to their employment skills. The system allows officials to increase the points awarded for skills in short supply. In Australia chefs and hairdressers are currently deemed worthy of additional immigration points.

“Migration has to support Britain’s national interests. A new Australian-style points-based system will be simpler, clearer and easier to enforce,” Mr Byrne said. “Crucially it will give us the best way of letting in only those people who have something to offer Britain.”

The scale of net migration has caused a marked change in public concern about immigration, Mr Byrne says. Globalisation and immigration have made Britain richer but have also “deeply unsettled the country”, he wrote in a pamphlet titled Rethinking Immigration and Integration, published by Policy Network, a centre-left think-tank.

He said: “We also have to accept that laissez-faire migration runs the risk of damaging communities where parts of our antipoverty strategy come under pressure.”

Mr Byrne says sudden increases in immigration into poor parts of Britain hit government attempts to improve life for the indigenous population. “When a junior school such as the school in Hodge Hill, my own constituency in Birmingham, sees its population of children with English as a second language rise from 5 per cent to 20 per cent in a year, then boosting standards in our poorest communities gets harder,” he said.

Last month research published by the Home Office said that thousands of impoverished asylum-seekers had been dumped in socially deprived areas of the country under the Government’s dispersal policy.

The study found they were met with resistance from local people, racial harassment and racist attacks. Their arrival also had a significant impact on local health and education services. It said placing asylum-seekers in poorer areas of the country, such as Everton, Glasgow, Tyneside and parts of Manchester, had accentuated existing deprivation among the indigenous population.

The report, which was produced in 2002 but only released under freedom of information laws last month, highlighted some of the difficulties caused by the arrival of new migrants in poor areas.

Fifty different languages had been introduced into Newcastle upon Tyne, and in other areas doctors dealing with new migrants experienced difficulties treating unfamiliar diseases such as malaria and TB.

A health centre in Liverpool found that there were 24 different languages spoken by asylum-seeking patients.

In a separate article in today’s pamphlet, Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham and a deputy leadership candidate, says that the communities undergoing the most rapid demographic change because of migration are the most poorly equipped to deal with it as they suffer high levels of poverty, social immobility and poor public services. John Reid, the Home Secretary, met the French Interior Minister yesterday and raised the issue of a centre being built offering showers, information and food to migrants gathering in Sangatte, northern France.

The Conservatives fear that the building will act as a magnet for those seeking to enter Britain illegally.

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