Is migration really about to halve?

Could our current record levels of immigration be a flash in the pan, a statistical spike brought about by the confluence of several exceptional factors? After the figure for the twelve months to June 2022 came in at 606,000 net and more than one million gross, that would be a comforting notion for those who believe that mass immigration on this scale is feeding multiple social pathologies, from housing shortages to collapsing cultural cohesion.

So perhaps we should rejoice at the news that two of our leading universities have put their seal upon a report suggesting that 2022’s net migration is not the shape of things to come but the product of several one-off factors which are likely to unwind in the years ahead. In a joint report by the Migration Observatory at Oxford University and the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, it is predicted that net migration will settle at around 300,000 annually.

In the old days, back when David Cameron was promising that he would get the figure down to the ‘tens of thousands’, such a figure was itself the cause of popular discontent. But the frog of public opinion has since undergone such an extended period in the saucepan of broken pledges that just getting back to the levels that unsettled it a decade ago would bring significant relief.

The experts at Oxford and LSE base their expectations largely on the prospect of emigration increasing – in the main by recent immigrants such as foreign students – accompanied by a tailing off in the number of arrivals under special schemes for citizens of Ukraine and Hong Kong.

‘High immigration leads to high emigration, but not immediately – there is a lag of two to three years. Unless there is a large change in emigration behaviour…it is reasonable to expect that emigration will increase between now and 2025, bringing down net migration, even if the number of people arriving in the UK remains high by historical standards,’ says the report.

Co-author Professor Alan Manning of LSE has however added some notes of caution about how confident people can be in the forecast, telling the Guardian: ‘Most plausible scenarios involve net migration falling in the coming years. But many different factors affect the outlook, including what share of international students switch to long-term work visas, whether work visa numbers continue to increase as sharply…and what happens to asylum applications. The unpredictability means it’s very hard for policymakers to guarantee that they will deliver a specific level of net migration.’

Given the past record of experts in predicting migratory flows, that must count as an understatement. In the most egregious case of the modern era, migration specialists at University College London conducted research for the Home Office in 2003 which suggested that the impact of EU enlargement embracing eight eastern European countries would increase immigration to the UK by between 5,000 and 13,000 annually. In fact, in 2007 alone there were 111,000 applications from east Europeans for documents permitting them to work in Britain. And remember, this projection only required the forecasters to assess the likely scale of the flow in one direction: incoming.

So I suggest anyone seeking a non-ivory tower assessment of the scale of potential immigration into our still-just-about-stable society with its just about functioning welfare state would do better to read the speech Suella Braverman made at the recent Conservative conference. In it she predicted a ‘hurricane’ of migration heading for our shores.

‘The wind of change that carried my own parents across the globe in the 20th century was a mere gust compared with the hurricane that is coming…Because today, the option of moving from a poorer country to a richer one is not just a dream for billions of people. It is an entirely realistic prospect,’ she said.

The Home Secretary may not be an authorised academic ‘expert’. But she is the one spotting the big picture here. The professors cannot see the wood for the trees.