Official figures show 50,000, mostly Polish applicants, registered to work between April and June 2007.
Some 9,600 Bulgarians and Romanians also registered under the tighter rules affecting those two EU members.
The Home Office says it met a 2006 target for removing failed asylum seekers - but new figures suggest it has missed it over the last 12 months.
On Eastern European workers, figures show a cumulative total of 683,000 applicants from nations which joined the EU after May 2004 - but that the rate of arrivals had slowed in 2007.
Between April and June 2007 there were 50,000 applications to join the UK's worker registration scheme compared with 52,000 in the first three months of the year and 65,000 in the last three months of 2006.
Some 66% of the applications have been Polish, a trend which has continued month-by-month in 2007. About 8% of the workers have dependants including children.
Bulgarian and Romanian workers were not allowed free access to the UK when the two nations joined in January 2007 - and figures show only 9,565 people from both nations applied to come to the UK between April and June 2007.
The last time it definitely hit the target was April-June 2006. The Home Office has stopped publishing data on the the so-called "tipping point" target.
Home Office Minister Tony McNulty said that while the focus had recently been on foreign prisoner removals, the overall picture was of an improving immigration system
In addition we removed nearly 2000 foreign national prisoners in the first six months of this year, and the prime minister has vowed to deport 4,000 by the end of the year."
"So you're talking about an inflow on a huge scale, which is in addition to even larger numbers that are coming from the Third World. This is placing a huge strain on our infrastructure - it's out of hand." - DDNEWS
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