Immigration figures blunder is symptomatic of a political class that refuses to take the issue seriously

“Take back control of our borders” – that was the aspiration voiced at the last election by pro-Brexit Conservative politicians. So, how is that going? Pretty well, one might assume, since the Tories won and got Brexit done. That, however, would be a false assumption, as has just been revealed by the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. It transpires that the data on immigration since 2012 has been hopelessly inaccurate.

Net immigration figures were 43,000 higher, on average, each year since 2012 than the official statistics showed. The Observatory discovered the discrepancy by comparing government figures based on the International Passenger Survey with ONS statistics. Net EU migration was almost 100,000 a year more than reported, partially offset by the fact that non-EU migration was 54,000 a year lower. But the bottom line is that overall immigration since 2012 has been 15 per cent higher than official figures suggested.

In concrete terms, that means that between 2012 and 2020 net immigration was approximately 387,000 more than government figures recorded. How can any government get something so crucially important to national security and social well-being so fundamentally wrong? Very easily, is the answer. For decades, immigration statistics issued by the Home Office have been regarded with total scepticism by many of the public – as a marriage of incompetence with a liberal agenda.

For evidence of that, it is only necessary to look at how the government is containing illegal immigration. Home Office statistics show that between 1 January 2019 and 1 October 2020 fewer than 250 migrants who had crossed the Channel illegally were returned to mainland Europe – just 2.5 per cent of almost 10,000 people who crossed illegally during that period. Since 2012, forced returns of people with no right to enter the UK have fallen from 15,000 to 5,000, over a period when illegal entry has been increasing. Returns of foreign criminals have reduced from 6,100 in 2016 to 3,400 in 2020. So far this year, there has not been one flight to return illegal Channel migrants.

The Home Office has failed even to enforce fingerprinting of illegal arrivals before they are allowed to disappear into the community. The ludicrous conditions laid down in the Dublin Convention, including limits on detention, time limits for repatriation and giving family links priority over the rule of return to the first country the migrant arrived in made a nonsense of that arrangement, which obtained until this year. In 2019 the grand total of 21 illegals was removed to France under the convention.

Lawyers and knowledgeable migrants manipulate immigration law – the latest ploy is claiming to be a victim of “modern slavery” – making our borders a mockery. Despite the Home Office having declared detention to be a crucial part of immigration control, it is increasingly phasing out detention of illegal arrivals. In 2010, there were 16,577 people returned after serving detention (64 per cent of those leaving detention); last year the figure was 4,048 (26 per cent of those leaving detention).

The authorities plead the Covid emergency, but the graph shows a consistent downwards slide since 2014, long before the advent of the novel coronavirus. Even when enforced, detention is largely derisory: in 2020, 54 per cent of detainees were held for seven days or less.

Removals of failed asylum claimants have declined even more, from 6,432 in 2009 to 1,742 in 2018. Figures for the past two years cannot be ascertained since the Home Office has stopped separating its summary returns data into separate asylum and non-asylum categories. No doubt it has its reasons. The Home Office has responded to a growing crisis of illegal migration by cutting enforcement resources by £47m last year, compared with 2016, and enforcement staff by 5 per cent.

The main problem, however, is a lack of political will to enforce immigration controls. Since the fast-track appeal process allowing asylum claimants to be detained while appeals were completed within 12 working days was blocked by a court in 2015, the government has made no attempt to introduce amended regulations. It has also reduced the detention estate by 40 per cent since 2015.

All of this means that the most useful methods of preventing illegal migrants from absconding into the community have been reduced or removed, creating a situation in which the think tank Civitas estimates that between 150,000 and 250,000 people illegally remain in or enter the UK every year. Illegal Channel arrivals are now 29 times as high as three years ago.

The security dimension is also concerning: one of the perpetrators of the 2017 London Bridge attacks, which saw 11 people killed and 48 injured, was a failed asylum seeker, as was the Libyan who murdered three men in the Reading terror attack last year; and other horrifying murders have been committed by people who should have been deported, but were not. MI5 has a list of 23,000 persons of concern, 3,000 of them “Subjects of Interest”, suggesting they pose a serious potential threat. Permissive immigration rules do not help them fulfil their remit.

The situation has long since spiralled out of control. Even with normal travel severely restricted, illegal entries to Britain have increased, with 16,500 detected last year. All of these assessments, of course, may be a huge underestimate, if Home Office figures are as inaccurate as they have been shown to be in estimating the headline migration statistics. For the past half century, it has been widely assumed that immigration figures are routinely massaged to reassure the public; this latest revelation will increase that perception. How is it possible to get something as basic as numbers entering or leaving a country so wrong?

The immigration crisis is rooted in politics. For two generations there has been a consensus among the political class that mass immigration is a “good thing”, that it somehow has a moral dimension and that it is wicked to oppose it. That consensus crosses party lines, whether it be Labour encouraging immigration to “rub the right’s nose in diversity”, or Tories eager to provide their corporate friends with cheap labour. Figures produced by Migration Watch have demonstrated that, contrary to some people’s perception, the Conservatives have a worse record than Labour on migration control.

Conservatives were given pause by the Brexit referendum, in which immigration ran a close second to sovereignty as the main motive for voting Leave. Boris Johnson pledged to “take back control of our borders” and Red Wall voters crumbled before the prospect of seeing their chief anxiety redressed. But Boris made a similar pledge to Northern Ireland unionists, only to create a border down the Irish Sea, which was not the frontier they had in mind. He is now the object of bitter disillusionment on the part of those unionists, but they cannot hurt him electorally.

The Red/Blue Wall constituency is a completely different matter: it has the power to consign the Tories to the political wilderness. Today, however, the latest on dit among the political class is that immigration is no longer on the electoral radar. Polls and focus groups, runs the conventional wisdom – that fatal delusion that kills political careers and whole parties – shows that the public is no longer concerned about immigration; panic over; time to return to open-borders business as usual.

That delusion could be the death of the Conservative Party. If immigration is not currently in the headlines it is because the whole country is preoccupied with the pandemic; with travel curtailed, the public presumes immigration must be reduced to a trickle. Northern voters were gratified by the way Boris “got Brexit done” and assume he was equally serious about controlling immigration. When they discover that the opposite is happening and controls on immigration are actually loosening, their anger will be intensified by a sense of betrayal, as in Northern Ireland.

The British public has not changed its views on immigration. In July 2019, a YouGov poll showed that 58 per cent of respondents thought immigration over the past decade has been too high; at the end of February 2021, the figure was 57 per cent. If that one per cent reduction, well within the margin of error, is mistaken by Downing Street and Westminster as a softening of opinion, then Team Boris is courting disaster. A January 2021 study based on the latest British Social Attitudes Survey reported that “participants became more inclined to back control”, not less.

This latest misreading of the runes by the political class is startlingly reminiscent of its complacent pre-Brexit referendum belief that “the people” would see sense and back Remain by a shedload of votes. Of all the issues on the political agenda, immigration is the one that is most dangerous to misjudge. Apart from Priti Patel’s crowd-pleasing innovations in immigration control – welcome as far as they go, but wholly inadequate to cope with what is now a crisis – all the signs are that the government is resolved to ignore the public will.

That would be calamitous: if the Conservatives imagine that Nigel Farage was the worst thing that could happen to them, they may eventually be horribly disabused of that illusion. The political class is trying to put the clock back to before 2016; that is a deluded exercise – immigration is the new Brexit.