UK immigration stats: headline figure will not tell the whole story

theguardian.com:

The release of official statistics is often the focus of political scrutiny, but the latest annual figures for overall net migration to the UK, due Thursday at 9.30am, are sufficiently anticipated they have prompted two separate policy announcements already.

On Tuesday, Suella Braverman rushed through a plan to reduce the number of people arriving via student visas by greatly limiting the scope for them to bring along family members.

A day later, Keir Starmer used every one of his prime minister’s questions allocation to lambast Rishi Sunak over the likely size of the statistics, and to present Labour ideas he argued would incentivise employers to train UK staff rather than bring workers in from overseas.

Immigration has long been a highly charged debate in UK politics, but with the end of free movement after Brexit, the Conservatives’ hope was that the argument on formal migration would be largely settled, with debate focusing on people arriving via unofficial routes such as small boats.

Instead, the near-46,000 arrivals who crossed the Channel this way will be only a small fraction of the total for net migration, which some have forecast could get into the high hundreds of thousands.

The last available figures showed the number stood at 504,000 in the year to June 2022, compared with 173,000 in the 12 months to June 2021. Those released on Thursday will be for the calendar year 2022, and are likely to be higher still.

What is going on? The short answer is this is the result of unexpected one-off factors and long-term choices.

In the first column comes one obvious bulge: the arrival of refugees from Ukraine and from Hong Kong. Similarly, the impact of Covid has skewed figures, with more shorter-term arrivals such as students