The immigration figures are good news

For a start the promise to bring down migration is driven by the government’s pandering to the madness of Brexit, and to the UKIP voters who got it across the line. The government is desperate to keep the hard right and the nationalists on board, and has promised to give them what they want – lower or even no immigration.

But that was always going to be impossible. There is an inescapable conflict between on the one hand the demands of the radical right and on the other the needs of the economy, common sense, and human decency.

The UK has welcomed Ukrainian refugees from the war and also thousands of Hong Kong nationals fleeing the Chinese government’s authoritarian controls. Together they make up 164,000 of the immigrant total. Another 88,000 were returning Brits, who we can hardly keep out

361,000 are students and their dependents and the vast majority of these go home after three years of study. During those three years they will spend a huge amount of money. Their fees keep many UK universities afloat, and they leave with a British qualification, British skills, and British tastes.

This is therefore one group of immigrants the government should be encouraging. But since it has sworn to bring the total down and students are easy to control, it is targeting them instead, by refusing many of them the right to bring family with them. It’s a knee jerk reaction that will harm the country, its education system and reputation. It will also do little to change the immigration figures because these people go home after qualifying anyway.

Then, of course, having shut down the free movement of EU nationals (immigration from the EU is falling) the UK is faced with an economy that is desperately short of people and skills, an NHS and social care system that would collapse without immigrants and many sectors of the economy where Brits just won’t or can’t work.

When 50% of children go to university there is, for some strange reason, a shortage of potato pickers. When you don’t train enough nurses and doctors you have to import them – something the NHS has been doing since it was founded.

The wider economy also needs large numbers of immigrants. We have an aging population and lots of people who are suffering long-term sickness or who have taken early retirement. As Andy Haldane the former chief economist at the Bank of England recently told the BBC, it “absolutely makes sense” to be lenient with migration rules when firms face staff shortages. In his view, the UK should be “liberal in our visa policies” to fill skills gaps, and that in turn would help to grow the economy.

But none of that will matter to the government or even, it is embarrassing to say, to the opposition, which will use these immigration figures as a stick to beat the government.

The real problem is not the level of immigration but the rancid politics of the immigration debate. The Brexit campaign during the referendum started it, with lies about Turkey joining the EU, EU borders with Syria and all those Poles coming over here and taking “our” jobs.

Ever since then, mainstream politicians have been terrified of the truth, which is that we need large levels of immigration to keep the economy growing. Less immigration means lower growth.

Unfortunately, as Ted Heath knew when he kicked Enoch Powell out of the party, once you play the race card it can never be taken back. It trumps everything else, even your own economic self-interest.

So ignore the politicians who are falling over each other to come up with nastier, stupider, and more damaging ways of reducing immigration. The truth is that these headline figures are in fact good news for the economy.