Prime minister Rishi Sunak has described the UK’s new immigration figures, showing over 600,000 net migration for the year ending December 2022, as “too high”. While revised estimates from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show this rate is actually the same as it was for the year ending June 2022, this figure is a record.
There are some obvious reasons why the numbers are up, such as “unprecedented world events throughout 2022”, as the ONS points to, and the lifting of pandemic travel restrictions. Special visa routes for people from Ukraine and Hong Kong contributed 172,000 people, and over 200,000 are international students and their dependants.
Who the figures include and exclude massively affects the total, and is, to some extent, arbitrary. For example, net migration could be reduced by a third with a simple swipe of the pen if the government did what some Conservative MPs have argued and removed international students from the figures (they tend to stay short term, and most leave at the end of their studies). People seeking asylum are now included (adding 72,000 to the total), but seasonal agricultural workers (38,000 visas in 2022) are excluded.
