Say what you like about the Tories but cutting immigration by 100,000 in a single day is impressive. To think Jeremy Corbyn says this government isn’t delivering.
Until now, official figures put the number of students overstaying their visa in the UK at 100,000. An update from the Office for National Statistics confirms critics’ suspicions that that total was flawed. In fact, the Home Office notes, last year only three percent of foreign students were unaccounted for. That means roughly 3,000 overstayed. Skim-readers and those out for a political fight have branded this a ‘blunder’ but the facts are more complex. Access to emigration data in this area has only been available since the introduction of exit checks. The ONS also acknowledges problems with the International Passenger Survey, the metric hitherto used to measure overstay numbers. These range from things as basic as students changing their plans after responding to the survey to the failure of ex-students to describe themselves as educational migrants when they leave.
This is the sort of stuff that leads to knife fights at statisticians’ conferences but doesn’t – and probably shouldn’t – get the rest of us worked up.
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