He said that they should not have allowed unchecked immigration from new EU states like Hungary and the Czech Republic in 2004, while pledging to refuse recruitment agencies using cheap foreign labour at the expense of “local talent”.

The government’s initial estimate that the 2004 changes would bring in around 13,000 immigrants was quickly proved wrong, when official figures suggest that there was a peak migration of 252,000.

Mr Miliband will be giving a speech to the IPPR think-tank later today, and he is expected to say: "We severely underestimated the number of people who would come here. We were dazzled by globalisation and too sanguine about its price.

"By focusing exclusively on immigration's impact on growth, we lost sight of who was benefiting from that growth - and the people being squeezed in the middle who were losing out. We became disconnected from the concerns of working people."

He is also expected to promise the following measures if Labour win power in the next election: to force medium and large-sized company to declare if their workforce is more than a quarter foreign; set up an early-warning systemto highlight areas where the workforce is "dominated by low-wage labour from other countries", and identify where British workers need better training.

Think tank Migration Watch UK have reacted to the news, calling it “music to our ears”. However they added, “it is a bit rich coming from a party which, when in government, threw open the doors of Britain to three and a half million foreign immigrants with total contempt for public opinion.”