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The Referendum by Numbers: Immigration
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What might happen to migration if we left the EU?
And what are the costs of EU migrants?
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I’m giving facts, rather than answers.
But from the research it is already within the gift of the UK government to act on non-EU migration already. And, unless you have a problem with migrants per se, they are a net benefit to the public purse.
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How many EU citizens are currently living in the UK?
Around 2000, the number of EU citizens was just over 1 million people. It’s gone up to just over 3 million people today, or an increase of about 168%.
A large part of this is because of new countries joining the EU between 2004-2009 (like Poland or Romania who were granted access to the UK labour market). There has also, more recently, been an increase in migrants from older EU countries (like Spain or Greece who’s economies have suffered badly since the financial crisis of 2008).
So the number is growing but by how much?
The answer is a bit of a mystery itself. Official statistics show that net migration to the UK has been between 200,000 and 300,000 a year for the past decade or so. Those numbers are very high by historical standards although well over half of that net migration has been from outside the EU, something over which the government already has control.
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In 2015 net migration (ie the number of people who come to the UK, minus those who’d left) was 333,000. Unusually, over half (184,000) were from the EU.
You might think that these numbers come from counting everyone in and everyone out but they don’t. Instead they come from the International Passenger Survey, which is carried out by approaching a random sample of people arriving at our ports, airports or Eurostar. It’s a big survey and hundreds of thousands of people are surveyed and the method has been used for years.
But the simple fact is that most people aren’t migrants – many are coming on holiday, others have come to study and some are British people returning from abroad. In this survey a person is only marked down as a migrant if they say they are planning to stay for a year or more. But there’s a problem.
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During the Referendum campaign another number has thrown our official migration statistics into question and it comes from the Department for Work and Pensions, which gives out National Insurance Numbers.
If you want to work in this country (or, for that matter, claim benefits) you need an NI number, so the DWP can see how many people from the EU are applying for NI numbers.
So how many?
The answer is a lot. A lot more than we would expect, given the International Passenger Survey. 630,000 EU registered for NI numbers between March 2015 and March 2016. The Passenger Survey, on the other hand, shows that 270,000 people migrated to the UK in the same period – that’s less than half as much. So what’s going on?
Just because the numbers seem to contradict each other doesn’t make them wrong – they are measuring different things. It is entirely possible that people coming here for less than a year might choose to register a NI number but rate of discrepancy has increased sharply over the last few years so something’s going on.
The Office for National Statistics looked at the discrepancy concluded that the gap between these two numbers is down to short-term migration – people who arrive in the UK for less than one year to work or study get captured by the DWP but not by the Passenger Survey. The ONS concludes that the Passenger Survey remains the best source of information for measuring long-term migration.
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But enough about the minor question of how many EU migrants there are in the UK (and forgetting the non-EU migrants the government already has power to do something about) – how might the situation change if the UK left the EU?
There are different possibilities.
We could be like Norway or Switzerland – both of which have arrangements to access the Common Market but have to accept freedom of movement for EU citizens as well. So if we were like Norway or Switzerland, nothing would change when it comes to EU migration.
But let’s say the UK was willing to give up access to the Common Market and imposed stricter migration controls. To be specific, let’s say we impose the same restrictions on EU migrants as we currently apply to migrants from outside the EU. What would happen to the numbers?
Migration Watch have a lot to say on this subject. They have a clear position – that current levels of migration are too high – but are not taking sides in the Referendum debate.
Matthew Pollard, Migration Watch’s Chief Executive: “If we impose the same sort of restrictions on EU migrants as we impose on non-EU migrants it would have a significant cut to EU net migration because around 60% of EU migrants are in low-skilled work. If they had come from outside the EU they wouldn’t qualify for a visa and we estimate this would cut net migration by around 100,000 on a current figure of 170,000 per year.”
This is an educated guess but other experts say it’s not unreasonable. And if EU migration was cut by 100,000 a year, net migration as a whole would be down by 1/3 from around 300k to around 200k.
But neither of the prominent Leave campaigns have suggested migration will stop altogether, just that it will happen differently and be ‘more targeted’ to bring in the skill the country needs.
Andrew Lillicoe again (economist for the Vote Leave campaing). He believes that long-term migration wouldn’t change after Brexit, although we might take more migrants from outside Europe. He believes that some parts of the UK need MORE not less immigration...
“The UK has had very high degrees of movements of people within Western Europe for 3000 years. I think the idea that we would start to seriously curtail migration from France or Spain is silly. I’m quite aghast at the way the issue of immigration has grown in the UK in the last 15-20 years, it seems to me to be completely unnecessary.
“What I would expect to happen is that once we left the EU is that we would have 2 or 3 years of the government showing that it could get migration down into the tens of thousands – just enough to prove it could do it – and then things would become much more relaxed again.”
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The reason Andrew Lillicoe believes a government will continue to allow migration is that all the evidence suggests that EU migrants are a benefit to the economy.
There is a strong consensus among labour markets and economists that EU migrants are likely to have a positive impact on the economy and public finances, both in the short and long terms. That is basically because they have very high rates of employment, higher employment rates than the native population. They’re also relatively young which means they’re more likely to be in work and considerably less likely to be a drain on public services. That is offset by the fact that recent EU migrants tend to be at the bottom of the income distribution but it is still a fact that someone who is working – even in a low paid role – is likely to make a positive contribution to public finances.
But Migration Watch have their concerns:
“The problem is not with migrants themselves – they are coming here to work and improve their lives – it’s the scale of migration that’s the problem and that is what’s resulting in our population growth at the moment and resulting pressures on housing stock, classroom size and general congestion. So there are costs associated with expanding infrastructure that don’t feature in fiscal calculations. So people individually make a contribution but taken together when you factor in infrastructure costs it becomes a cost.”
Given the consensus that EU migrants pay more in tax than they take out rapid migration isn’t a problem if the authorities keep pace – they have the cash to hire the teachers or build the schools. The question is whether they have the will or agility to respond to the needs of areas with a lot of migrants.
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