Net migration has surged to 504,000. Why?

Net migration to Britain has passed 500,000 for the first time ever – twice as high as the recently upgraded forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility. The figure is quite stunning. Net migration had been expected to halve to just over 100,000 after Brexit, a figure the OBR doubled to 200,000 last week. So what’s going on? And how reliable is the data?

It’s a complex story, and the 504,000 headline figure can be deceptive. It’s a mixture of students flooding back after lockdown and a surge in Ukrainians and Hong Kongers who arrived here as part of one-off refugee policies under Boris Johnson. EU net migration actually turned negative: some 51,000 more people went back to Europe last year than arrived on British shores. The ONS also calculates this in different ways.

About a quarter of the non-EU migration is accounted for by students, counted as migrants by the ONS. Brexit means EU nationals need to apply for work visas, so the 89 per cent rise in such visas is distorted by this new criterion. But the visas do show the changing face of UK migration. Some 130,000 work visas have been granted to people from India this year, and while it’s not exactly free movement, 98 per cent of Indian nationals who applied for a visa were granted one. Next on the list comes Nigerians, followed by Filipinos and people from Zimbabwe. The migrant workforce is more global than ever.

Brexit has not reduced or even slowed immigration to the UK, it’s just changed where migrants come from. That’s been clear for some time. The Spectator Data Hub uses data from the ONS’s Labour Force Survey to calculate the proportion of the workforce not born in the UK. That figure – both as a proportion and headcount – has been rising consistently and sits at a near-record high as the below survey shows.

The UK has somehow managed to absorb a million immigrants with the worker shortage crisis unabated and vacancies still near a record high of 1.2 million, while 5.2 million are on out-of-work benefits. Mass migration gives ministers the option of ignoring this problem and growing the economy using newcomers. This looks rather different to the high-wage, high-skill and low-migration model spoken of during the Brexit debate.