Caps on migrant numbers 'don't really work' - says Sky News' Ed Conway

yeah thanks well I mean throughout this campaign we're going to be going through a lot of the the big issues that are coming up here uh some of the claims that we're hearing about from uh the parties and also just giving you a sense of the state of the economy the state of the country right now and as you mentioned immigration it is one of the big issues uh in this election we're going to be hearing a lot about it we've heard a lot about it from all of these people from these Party leaders we'll hear more about it I imagine but there are also lots of misconceptions about migration so before we get to the particular kind of claims and policies that we are hearing about today let's just go through some of these misconceptions there's three of them really that you might hear about a lot and you're wondering well are they actually true and a lot of people saying this is all about small boats so the migration story is mostly about small boats it's not quite right okay it's not just small boats let me just show you the numbers on this okay small boats this is just back last year we're looking at the full year numbers for 2023 small boats you're talking just under 30,000 people coming in uh on small boats very high in historical uh kind of proportion but nonetheless compare that to the overall numbers for Asylum Seekers and that's significantly higher 81,000 now compare that to for instance people coming in to study and look at this bar okay that's up by 379,000 so just look at the difference between them uh and then look at the number of people coming in to work in that year 423,000 and then you've got other reasons as well add it all up and you're talking about over a million people coming in small boats really only a small fraction of that of course Very visible lots of talk about it but in the big picture here is about something else entirely also another misconception some people are saying well isn't this mostly about numbers of people coming in from Ukraine and Hong Kong well definitely that has been a factor okay but let me just compare overall reasons this is people coming in from all over the world outside of Hong Kong outside of Ukraine big numbers there now add on Ukraine and Hong Kong and because while it is pretty sizable it is small in comparison with this other big mass of migration that's immigration that we've seen uh into the UK final thing final misconception more broadly some people have been looking at these numbers and saying listen there's nothing abnormal happening at the moment you know migration numbers they're basically in line with where they have been for some time well that is absolutely not wrong either this is showing you um total net migration so the number of people coming in minus the number of people going out going back as a percentage of the population so it's comparable going back to 1855 okay so this is a very very long range thing anything anyone going out is above the line anyone coming in rather going in above the line and when more people are leaving that's below the line look at the line here in the last few years just look at what's happened to net migration we have never seen it as high as it is right now that is a historic High going back more than 150 years so that is very striking indeed and it's worth just keeping all of that in mind when we go on some of these pledges when it comes to the pledges okay so the latest one we've had is from richy sunak and he says the plan on immigration uh is working but migration levels are still too high so we're going further we have a clear plan to stop the boats and put a legal cap on numbers now as I was saying the boats is you know relatively smaller in terms of the grand scheme of things this legal cap is interesting the problem is what we haven't heard from richy sunak is what is that cap actually going to be so we don't know what it's going to be they say that it's going to be decided each Parliament but it's worth just going back and looking back at the history of caps because we have had caps on net migration most notoriously David Cameron said that he wanted to keep net migration into the tens of thousands and so that was a cap that existed in that period Theresa May kept it as well look at the line look at the dossed line did that work well let's bring on the numbers no it didn't so at no point in that period did that cap on migration actually was it met now Boris Johnson then came in uh he actually kind of got rid of the cap but he had a you know he wanted a constraint he had a a points based system ironically that was actually the one period where the numbers did go down below where that cap was was largely because of covid then you had brexit coming in post brexit rules Come into force and just look at what happened to net migration after those brexit rules came into Force so post brexit a lot of people thought brexit was all about trying to get migration down in fact the opposite actually happens um final thing to say it's not just Russy sunak we've heard from on this it's also this man Nigel farage he says I said this just today that net migration shouldn't be capped it should be zero and that raises another question when was the last time that net migration was zero and if we look back at this chart same thing net migration that's people kind of more when the number of people coming in outnumbers those who are going out the red bars are showing you when there's more people leaving the country and you can see yes there were moments where there was basically zero net migration look at this one okay so that's 1992 to 1993 that was when the UK was in recession okay there was a period here 1998 when there there was freedom of movement suddenly there was an immigration act the UK it meant that people from the UK could go out and work in the EU then you've got negative net M migration and then there's this large period actually for most of the postwar period the UK had negative net migration more people leaving than coming in but at the time people weren't thinking that was a good news story they thought it was a bad news story it's because people didn't want to come to the UK they wanted to leave they wanted to find work elsewhere and people were fretting about the brain drain so it's certainly true that it has happened in the past it's certainly true these numbers here were unprecedented and I showed that chart earlier going back to 1855 and it's certainly true that you could get uh NE kind of either zero or negative net migration um but it is definitely more of an economic story about how the economy is doing rather than any caps that have been in place over that period Ed it's absolutely F fascinating analysis as always I mean if we my main question is if we were to go back to that first chart which broke down where the numbers came from over a million uh for 2023 and what the breakdown was the biggest bar I think was people coming in to work and and if you were to remove that what would be the result presumably at least a chunk of that would be jobs not filled as opposed to jobs filled by uh domestic workers I mean talk to us about the demographic position and whether we need people to come in to fill those jobs or else the alternative is almost a likeforlike trade-off of unemployment Rising well I think that's I mean that's a really good point and some people would say actually you shouldn't really include the study numbers so this is students coming into the UK and their dependence okay so there's a question mark as you know about kind of a third of that is dependence and and and kind of slightly more than that is dependence so you know wives Partners uh children is is is is a part of those bars some people say you shouldn't really include that because that's people who are coming in for a few years but as you point out this is the big one okay and this is comes comes back to that broader point about that last chart I was showing you you know it's nice to think that you could just put a cap and actually it would get it would actually work in practice what is migration it's usually a function of what's going on in the economy if your economy is doing well and people actually want to come and work there and you have a shortage of workers here which we certainly do right now shortage of people in the workforce then you just get migration that's just the way that this this tends to work uh and if you weren't to have that then we would have real trouble filling lots of jobs uh filling lots of positions in the UK we have a shortage postco of positions uh of of workers for those positions that are needed particularly in the NHS and actually a large chunk one of the largest chunks of that is people coming in to work in health whether it's nurses in Social care and so on so these numbers are in no way trivial they're enormous as I'm saying but they are a function really of where the economy is right now what's happening postco and really of those kind of the hierarchy of things that actually influenced this caps is way down on this the history of caps basically says they don't really work what if it was more means tested and and you kind of made it stricter which I I guess James cleverly shortly after becoming Home Secretary did a little bit and maybe we haven't got the the results of that and uh imposed tougher restrictions on what it has to be to have a worker coming from abroad versus at home I mean presumbly that would just fuel wage inflation to some extent and also trying to shake away inflation that's that's that's definitely the idea so so you you can bring in more stringent caps on various different policies and I think the government would say look when you look at the shape of this it is starting to flatten off and that might well be you know as a result of some of our policies although to be honest with you these numbers get revised a lot we sometimes they look like they're kind of going down a bit and then revision comes in and actually that's going up so for the time being it doesn't look like any of those policies have had much of a difference um but as I say we we have never seen anything like this it followed brexit it followed a big change in the immigration system but at the same time you had covid at the same time you had the the aftermath of that at the same time you've had uh these flows of immigrants from from Ukraine and Hong Kong so there is a lot going on um but it's it's entirely reasonable that we have this conversation because as I say we have never seen these numbers looking as high as they are at the moment and that is a legitimate part of that of the election debates

Channel: Sky News

Views: 61,704

Keywords: Sky News, Sky, Ed Conway, Migration, Immigration, Data and Forensics, Analysis, People, Small boats, Migtants, Students, Workers, Dependents

Id: TabIsYoO7gA

Length: 9min 19sec (559 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 04 2024