Stop the boats! If you’ve been paying attention, you may just have noticed that this is a core priority for the government. In fact some of its members go even further. In a speech last week the immigration minister Robert Jenrick insisted that “there is no more important issue in our domestic politics than the question of who gets to come to this country and in what numbers”.
But much less attention has been paid to what is, numerically, a much bigger issue: the extraordinary growth of migration via perfectly legal routes.
Between June 2021 and June 2022 net migration hit a record 504,000 people — roughly 1.1 million long-term arrivals, set against 560,000 departures.
We don’t yet have the next set of figures, covering
