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LONDON, Monday (AFP)

At least a million immigrants are living illegally in Britain at any time, and have been for more than a decade, The Sun tabloid newspaper reported here Monday.

The report is bound to fuel a growing debate here over immigration which has centred around daily attempts by would-be immigrants to sneak through the Channel tunnel from France to southern England.

John Tincey, of the British Immigration Service Union, said it was "very difficult" to see how there could be any fewer than one million illegal immigrants living in the United Kingdom, the paper reported.

Many have probably been living in Britain since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, Tincey was quoted as saying in the popular tabloid.

Up to 200,000 immigrants make their way into Britain each year, he added.

Based on what his union members face "day by day", Tincey said the "missing million" was a very conservative estimate.

"It's not a high figure considering that when the poll tax was introduced, two million people disappeared from electoral registers" he told the paper.

"It's a changing number as people come and some people stay... We know there's large scale abuse of documents and impersonation and we are not picking up all of these people," he added.

Asked about the claims, a Home Office spokeswoman said it was impossible to estimate accurately the number of people living here that, by definition, they don't know about.

"It is difficult to say how many have entered a country clandestinely," she said. "It is something we are aware of and something we are looking into, but it is difficult."

Tincey argued that Britain was a "soft touch" for immigrants.

"The problem for the last 30 years is that immigration control has been neglected ever since the 1971 Immigration Act. "The first thing you would have to do is rewrite the rules to make sure they are enforceable," he said.

Meanwhile the head of Germany's Social Democratic Party said that the party needed to find a compromise with opposition parties over government-backed proposals to change the country's immigration laws.

"We must have the approval of the CDU-CSU (Christian Democrats) and the FDP (Liberals) because we need their backing," Franz Muentefering told the ZDF television channel.

The proposals aim to fill a gap in certain sectors of the Germany economy where migrant labour is needed but would also establish a points system to evaluate the suitability of other candidates for immigration according to age, education, origin and knowledge of German culture.

The draft proposals would particularly lower the age up to which children have the right to join foreign parents already living in Germany. Muentefering described the proposals as delicate, but said he was hopeful that a compromise could be reached on the plans, put forward by Interior Minister Otto Schily.

Meanwhile the Greek coastguard netted 68 illegal immigrants mainly from Afghanistan aboard a fishing boat near the island of Kos, the country's maritime ministry said.

The boat was escorted by coastguard launches to the beach resort of Agios Fokas on Kos where the immigrants were safely disembarked, a ministry spokesman said.

An official enquiry has been opened into the incident and the prosecutor's office was informed.

Amongst the immigrants were 10 women and 16 children.

On Wednesday, a total of 275 illegal immigrants - mostly Iraqi Kurds, but also Palestinians, Iranians and Afghans - were forced to swim to shore after being dropped off a Turkish boat near the Aegean island of Evvoia.

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