BABIES born to immigrants make up the majority of births in some cities, a think-tank said yesterday.

One in five of the 640,000 births in England and Wales in 2004 was to a mother born outside Britain.

The figure has risen by more than half in the past decade and is now the highest since data were introduced in 1969.

In some London boroughs, 70 per cent of births are to women who were not born in Britain.

However, the average number of children born to each ethnic minority family has fallen in the past 15 years. Academics say this is because almost all immigrant groups eventually adopt the average family size of the country where they settle.

Migrationwatch, the immigration think-tank that produced the report, said strict limits should be imposed on arranged marriages with a partner from overseas. It claims the birth trend is increasing segregation, and blames Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities for “chain migration”. It said this was “intensifying the formation of ghettos and setting back integration”.

Sir Andrew Green, the chairman of Migrationwatch, admitted that there was no evidence to prove that levels of immigration had an impact on the degree of integration. But he said: “The very high rates of immigration in recent years are creating areas in which children with two UK-born parents are in a minority. This poses serious difficulties for effective integration as there will increasingly be no core culture with which to integrate.

“The children in these areas are likely to go to school with little access to British culture. The schools themselves will have only a minority of children with both parents born in the UK.

“A much slower rate of foreign immigration and tighter rules to discourage intercontinental marriages are essential if there is to be a reasonable prospect of achieving the degree of integration needed to maintain social harmony in Britain.”

In 1994 there were 82,101 births to women not born in Britain — 12.4 per cent of all births. By 2004 this had risen to 124,563 babies, or 19.5 per cent.

Of these women, 4.4 per cent were from Europe, 2.6 per cent from Africa, 2.5 per cent were Pakistani, 1.4 per cent Indian, 1.4 per cent Bangladeshi, 0.6 per cent Caribbean, 0.5 per cent from the US and 0.2 per cent from the Far East.

Two thirds of the babies also had a father who was not born in Britain.

The largest rise is among women aged in their 20s and early 30s. In London, 49 per cent of births were to women born abroad. Other cities with high rates include Slough (48 per cent), Luton (44 per cent), Leicester (38 per cent), Cambridge (36 per cent) and Birmingham (34 per cent). Wales had the lowest rate at 7.1 per cent.

But a spokeswoman for the Commission for Racial Equality said: “Migrant and ethnic minority populations are still below 10 per cent.

• More than half of Britons believe that immigration has made Britain a better place to live, according to a poll for Reader’s Digest magazine. Seventy per cent said that their everyday experience of immigrants had been positive. Of the eight European countries questioned, British people were the most supportive of Muslim women’s right to wear Islamic head coverings, with 64 per cent in favour.

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