What’s new today?

We saw the latest official statistics on immigration. This is the last batch we will get before the election and it’s not good news for David Cameron.

The Office for National Statistics said net migration – that’s people coming in minus people leaving the country – was 298,000 in the year ending September 2014, up from 21,000 in the previous 12 months.

Outlining the government’s new immigration policy in 2011, David Cameron said: “I believe that will mean net migration to this country will be in the order of tens of thousands each year, not the hundreds of thousands every year that we have seen over the last decade.”

The phrase “no ifs, no buts” is sometimes thrown back at the prime minister in relation to this speech, although to be strictly accurate, he didn’t say: “No ifs, no buts – net migration below 100,000.”

He said: “Borders will be under control and immigration will be at levels our country can manage. No ifs. No buts.”

Nevertheless, net migration is clearly still in the order of hundreds of thousands, and today’s news is being reported as a humiliating failure for the Conservatives (the Lib Dems never endorsed it).

Is this a surprise?

Not at all. Way back in 2011 Oxford University’s Migration Observatory were predicting that government policies would fail to cut immigration to anything like the levels needed to hit Mr Cameron’s target.

This was based, among other things, on impact assessments published by the government itself.

The basic issue was that there were too many variables that were not under the government’s control. Net migration can be affected by the number of British citizens moving in and out (in fact this hasn’t changed much) and by migration to and from EU countries.

The EU principle of free movement of people makes it difficult to control these flows, so government policy was mostly about cutting migration from outside Europe.

So is this all about Europe?

That’s the impression you might get from listening to some Conservative ministers, but it can’t be true.

Today the immigration and security minister, James Brokenshire, said: “We have been blown off course by net migration from within the EU, which has more than doubled since 2010.”

He’s right about the last bit. Net migration from Europe (the orange line) has doubled since the government launched its new policies in 2011, while net migration from outside the EU (grey) is lower now than it was then.

But even if net migration from the EU was zero, net migration from outside Europe is still so high (190,000) that total net migration would still be more than 100,000. The Conservatives still miss their target if we disregard the EU completely.

What if we HAD hit the target?

Funnily enough, the Oxford researchers think that, even if net migration had fallen to below 100,000 today, it wouldn’t have stayed there for long.

This is because of what they call the “net migration bounce” effect.

Basically, immigration goes in cycles. It might go up suddenly if a lot of migrant workers arrive, but many of them will leave after a few years and as they go, the out-flow brings net migration down.

Our best estimate is that about 21 per cent of foreign students and only 11 per cent of people who come here on a tier 5 (temporary worker) visa will still be in the country five years later.

If you suddenly cut back on immigration, you don’t get the out-flow years later.

So had the Conservatives achieved the headline they wanted today, it probably would not have heralded a permanent return to the days of tens of thousands of migrants a year.

What happened to all those Bulgarians and Romanians?

There was a great deal of speculation about a sudden influx of migrant workers from Bulgaria and Romania after transitional employment restrictions were lifted on 1 January 2014. It didn’t happen.

It is now clear that immigration from the A2 or “EU2” countries is steadily on the rise. The latest figures show net migration of 37,000 in the year to September 2014, up from 24,000 in the previous 12 months. Some 27,000 said they were coming for work.

Rising immigration from the EU2 countries is in line with recent rises from other EU countries, as this ONS graph shows:

Labour Force survey figures, which attempt to measure stable populations not flows of people in and out of the country, said there were 252,000 Romanians and Bulgarians living in the UK in the third quarter of 2014, up from 205,000 a year earlier.

The growth rate is similar before and after the labour market controls were lifted in January last year. There was no sudden spike but immigration from those countries continues to rise.