The government has been in a celebratory mood since the release of the latest immigration figures. The Home Secretary tweeted that the latest ONS figures show that ‘net migration is down 82 per cent’, to 171,000 people a year, and ‘asylum hotel use is down 36 per cent since last year’. But these headline statistics hide bleak truths, and in reality the picture is dire for Labour and for the country.
High net migration is not the problem – it is merely a symptom of the rapid and destructive pace of population transformation
In truth, ‘net migration’ is a misleading measurement, because it is produced by subtracting departures from arrivals. The ONS estimates that 813,000 people immigrated to the UK last year, with 627,000 (77 per cent) of them arriving from non-EU countries. These included 138,000 Indians, 56,000 Pakistanis, 54,000 Chinese and 47,000 Nigerians. Meanwhile, 642,000 left the UK – including a quarter of million British nationals and 118,000 EU nationals. This represents substantial population change – almost 400,000 Brits and Europeans left this country last year, to be replaced by 627,000 migrants from some of the poorest countries in the world. This matters because all populations are not equal.
