The ‘debate’ about immigration sparked by last week’s record figures is not so much an exchange of views but a cocktail of prejudices, erroneous facts and targets plucked out the air.
The issue should be not about numbers but about skills or more precisely, the lack of them, in the UK.
By boxing themselves in with an arbitrary target of 100,000 in annual net migration ministers have begun the debate about the merits of immigration completely on the wrong foot while the issue about the tiny number of immigrations claiming benefits is a red herring, as is the number of students over-staying (about 2%).
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