Half a million people. That’s quite a lot, isn’t it? I mean, half a million here, half a million there, why, soon you’re talking a million, which is even more of a nice round figure. But that’s the statistic we should be talking about when it comes to the migration stats today from the Office for National Statistics. The crucial figure tucked away in there is in fact 542,000, which is the number of people who came to Britain in the year up to September 2014, excluding returning Brits. And of these foreign immigrants, non-EU citizens were the majority, 292,000 of them. That, I think, is more significant than the little game we play in working out net migration, which, as Vince Cable never tires of telling us, depends on the numbers of emigrating Brits which the government can’t do anything about.
Actually, net foreign migration is perhaps an even more useful figure, viz, the numbers of people from abroad coming in, minus the numbers leaving. About 190,000 foreign citizens left the UK last year – 89,000 EU citizens, 101,000 from elsewhere. If you set this number of 190,000 against the half million-odd foreign citizens coming here, you’re left, if I’m correct, with 353,000 people – still an awful lot.
I think it matters how we count the numbers. You can’t quite trade off the number of Brits leaving – 137,000 last year – against the numbers coming in, simply because the footprint isn’t quite the same. A family from Eritrea or Afghanistan coming here will have rather greater demands on public services than the Brits who are emigrating. On paper, a foreign national coming in cancels out a British pensioner going out, possibly to spend their retirement money somewhere warm. In practice, their respective impact on housing and schools – I dunno about the NHS – will be quite different, not to mention their effect on that euphemistic measure we call social cohesion. And to refine things further, I think an English-speaking migrant from Australia – Mr Micawber’s great, great, great granddaughter perhaps – or Canada or the US would fit in easier than any other category. What we’re really talking about is problematic immigration, those who, for cultural and language reasons, don’t easily integrate.
Which isn’t to say that most of the people coming to the country won’t be decent, hard-working and anxious to do the best for their families, just like the rest of us. I don’t buy the notion that people come here to be benefit junkies. But bald net migration figures still don’t tell us half the story.
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