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UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers speaks with migration expert Dr. Madeleine Sumption to dissect the latest ONS figures which reveal a dramatic crash in UK net migration. Is this truly caused by an alarming “exodus of fed-up Brits,” as some headlines suggest, or is the surge in people leaving the country, in fact, the long-overdue re-migration of earlier non-EU and EU immigrants—a data-driven truth that fundamentally upends how the media and public understand the entire politics of immigration?
The reason the methodology changed in the way the ONS counted British citizens leaving is that using the Traveller Survey was rubbish. All it did was give a survey to a handful of people in airports and extrapolated from that. When they moved to the new system the numbers leaving went up dramatically.
But Freddie and Madeleine Sumption didn’t make the connection to the pre-Brexit EU immigration figures.
When we were in the EU, we also measured immigration from EU citizens using the same Traveller Survey. This was because EU citizens didn’t need a visa to live and work here.
I believe we actually had 3x the number of EU citizens immigrating here in the EU years than the ONS counted. This is borne out to some degree in the National Insurance number allocation figures during these years, the the numbers of EU citiznes who applied for ILR after 2016 and also in the census data.
This is, I think, why Madeleine Sumption is surprised by the high numbers of EU citizens that continue to leave the UK. There were many more who came here in the first two decades of the 21st C than the ONS figures show. In fact I think net immigration ran at more like 500-600k during the EU years rather than 200-300k and we just were not measuring it properly.
I think what Fraddy forgot to notice is the fact that: the imigrant’s profile has changed. New imigrants are more asylum seekers who tend to stay. Less people come in with a skilled worker visa. Less people come as overseas students who pay high tuition fees and spend in the economy and more enterperneurs and Doctors leave. Skills that bring benefit to society and the ecomony are being replaced by what?
It’s net contribution not net migration that matters.
FS yet again misses the wood for the trees.
Remigration is for all the foreign born criminals and for those who do not integrate, do not work and do not contribute.
As Dr Sumption points out, the vast numbers of asylum seekers DO NOT LEAVE regardless of whether their claims succeed or not.
There is increasing data about the many horrific crimes committed by these unvetted migrants and how few of them actually work, pay taxes or contribute.
This is not at all surprising. Most are unskilled and do not speak English – how on earth can they be expected to work, contribute or integrate into wider society?