Whitehall and public ‘split over migrant concerns’

Fundamental differences between what the public considers to be immigration and the Government’s definition could lead to approaches “poorly tailored to the actual sources of public concern”, said the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.

The comments came ahead of the introduction of a 20,700 limit on the number of skilled workers coming to the UK from outside the European Union each year as part of Government efforts to cut net migration from 200,000 to the tens of thousands by 2015.

Observatory director Dr Martin Ruhs, a member of the Migration Advisory Committee which advises the Government, said: “There are many disagreements about migration in the UK, but one thing that unites everyone is that for many years there have been serious problems with the evidence base.

“Reform of immigration policy is currently a major Government priority, which clearly requires solid evidence on which to base changes to the system.”

In their report on the problems with immigration statistics in the UK, the researchers said the available evidence “lacks detailed information on a crucial issue – how do members of the public define ‘immigrants’?

“When responding to poll questions about ‘immigration’, are most people thinking about foreign students, workers, or asylum seekers, for example? Do members of the public distinguish between EU and non-EU nationals? Or between newly-arriving migrants and migrants already settled in the UK?”

The definitions used by members of the public and Government may diverge, the report said, “such that some approaches to reducing net-migration statistics might be poorly tailored to the actual sources of public concern”.

“Estimates of the number of migrants in the UK can also be “very imprecise”, the report found, and there was “a lack of systematic data on the immigration status of migrants in the UK.”