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The debate neglects a third factor, which will hobble any immigration policy: data. Should Zia Yusuf, Reform’s home-affairs spokesman, or Chris Philp, his Tory rival, ever reach the home secretary’s office at 2 Marsham Street they will find a remarkably cloudy picture. There are vast gaps in the government’s understanding of its immigrant population. A lot of data are uncollected; what is held is often unreliable. The Home Office recognises the problem: it says “insufficient data collection” reflects Labour’s inheritance of a “migration system that was out of control”.
True, official data on migration patterns (what you might call the “flow”) have improved in the past five years, says Ed Humpherson, the head of the Office for Statistics Regulation, an official watchdog. An unreliable passenger survey has been replaced by studies of tax and other administrative data, which enables more granular analysis, he says. Data on people arriving by small boats over the English Channel are published daily. The Home Office has high hopes for ATLAS, a new IT system for visa and asylum cases, which has been launched after years of delays.
But the picture of the “stock” of people living in Britain is much blurrier. Britain does not have a population register underpinning a system of identity cards, as in much of continental Europe, and plans for such a scheme have been diluted. Go back more than a decade or two, and the records from waves of migration quickly become muddy, says Sir Philip Rutnam, a former permanent secretary at the Home Office. The state relies on people obeying their visa conditions, and occasional raids by Home Office enforcement units. “We are not North Korea. We do not track people’s movements around the country,” says Jon Simmons, the Home Office’s former chief statistician.
The resulting gaps in big-picture data are listed in a recent report by Georgina Sturge of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. The Home Office admits it doesn’t have an accurate figure for the size of Britain’s “illegal” population (an independent estimate in 2017 suggested 700,000-900,000, now likely to be higher). Nor does it have reliable figures for how many people have overstayed their visas. For those legally present, there are no solid data on what work they do, or their nationality. Nor is there a clear picture of where everyone lives, legally or not. Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, says that migrants should “earn” citizenship” by doing things like volunteering, but the state doesn’t measure this either.
What is left, says Ms Sturge, are inferences made up of a patchwork of indicators collected for wholly different purposes. Official estimates can be wildly wrong. When a special residence scheme was created for EU citizens after Britain left the bloc, officials expected 3.7m cases. In the end 5.6m people applied.
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