The government’s immigration numbers are wrong again

The immigration statistics saga takes another turn today, as the News of the World produces figures showing that immigrants from the 25 EU countries account for just 32% of the total. Ergo, ministers have been able to control immigration all along – and its repeated suggestions to the contrary are untrue.
 
It fingers Liam Byrne, who attacked Cameron’s proposals last week with a very different statistic. “His small print seems not to touch European Economic Area nationals, overseas students and dependents who made up 80 per cent of British incomers last year,” said Byrne.
 
Now, Byrne is one of the good guys in this government, but his occupational hazard is going out there with data supplied to him by the Home Office. The NOTW figues are solid – from the ONS itself in an August report (Table 2, link here). It shows that, of the 468,000 non-British immigrants in 2005-06, just 149,000 (32%) come from the EU25. Unless almost all of the remainder were students and family-reunification candidates, the Home Office has – yet again – some serious explaining to do.