Migration: have we been misled?
If you have ever slipped up at work, remember, it could have been worse, said Stephen Bush in the New Statesman: you could have distorted seven years of British policymaking. Last week, it emerged that the Office for National Statistics has long been wildly over-estimating the number of foreign students who stay on in Britain after their visas expire. It had put the number at up to 100,000 a year and – vowing to “get numbers down” – Theresa May, when Home Secretary, had curbed the freedom of students to come to the UK. Meanwhile, the erroneous figures were included in net migration statistics, adding to public anxiety about immigration, and probably fuelling the Brexit vote. We now know that 97% of students go home – only around 4,700 stay on. But why such anxiety in the first place? Overseas students have injected billions into universities, transforming those institutions – which have in turn helped regenerate many British towns and cities. And if they decide to settle here, so much the better, said Steve Bloomfield in Prospect. These are the world’s brightest and the best. We should be urging them to stay, not chasing them off.
Alas, it’s not just students who no longer feel welcome in Britain, said The Independent. European workers are leaving in droves: the number rose by 33,000 in the year to March. Some say that since the referendum, they’ve felt unwanted and insecure about their futures; why stay in the UK, with its slowing economy, weak currency, and squeeze on living standards, when even the “most benighted” parts of the Eurozone seem to be on a “path to recovery”? Not only will we lose their tax receipts, our economy will be deprived of everything from baristas and builders, to the doctors, nurses and technicians who keep the NHS running.
Yes, immigration has been a boon in many ways, said Nick Timothy in The Daily Telegraph. But we still need to be able to control it. Rising numbers have put huge pressure on schools (there are 577,000 more pupils in English schools than in 2009), and immigration is behind a third of new demand for housing. Added to that, it has made business lazy, said Fraser Nelson in the same paper: why train up British teenagers, or invest in your own staff, when you can hire a qualified Romanian to do the job? Why spend money on new machines, when unskilled labour is so cheap? Migration is a “complex balance of gain and loss”, said The Times. It’s vital we agree a sensible post-brexit policy, but how can we do that when we haven’t even got reliable data about who is here? It is “high time the Government got a handle on its statistics”.