Failure to make significant progress will send droves of both Conservative and Labour voters into the arms of UKIP.
Evidence suggests that many who come to study here don’t return home, which makes calls to remove them from net migration statistics disingenuous.
They are divorced from reality, almost contemptuous of public opinion and, sadly, irresponsible.
It’s front page story exactly a week ago misrepresented an Office of Budget Responsibility report. (P.S: The OBR isn’t doing too well itself either.)
The public will never accept that the number of entrants cannot be controlled.
It has worked in Australia but in a totally different context.
The Chairman of Migration Match responds to the article a week ago on this site by Mark Field MP.
And Ministers must also take on the vociferous student lobby.
Are we really meant to change immigration policy on the basis of the answers to a skewed question from 14 people?
Besides, one quarter’s figures do not alter the bigger picture. It may not be long before net migration from the EU exceeds that from the rest of the world.
There is no conflict between immigration control and an open economy. And it would help if this new group could get its facts right.
Had the migration patterns of the 18 years before the Conservatives set their target been maintained, they might have hit it.
Nick Robinson’s programme was a reminder of the corporation’s continuing failure to cover the subject properly.
When the target was set in 2009, EU migration had, for the previous decade, been largely cancelled out by British emigration. That is no longer the case.
The introduction of a work permit scheme that confines EU migration to skilled employment would by our calcuation reduce it net by approximately 100,000 a year.