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Originally Posted by Chris
What I find odd is that this morning, the Government sneaked out the results of that FOI request about the number of NI numbers handed out to immigrants - 2.2 million between 2010 and 2015, as it turns out, despite official immigration figures over the same period being under one million - yet the BBC is totally ignoring it.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016...uth-is-as-wid/ |
That came out yesterday morning:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politic...endum-36271390
According to the ONS the difference is because these are people that stay less than a year.
https://fullfact.org/immigration/eu-...e-number-data/
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No ‘extra’ immigration to the UK from the EU has been proven today, as headlines like these imply. We already knew about some of these extra 1.3 or 1.5 million people, as they were published separately as ‘short-term immigrants’ by the ONS. The rest were estimated in today’s analysis as recent figures aren’t yet available.
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This is largely what people were saying previous to this report as the reason for the discrepancy:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politic...endum-35959949
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More importantly, though, the ONS figures only aim to measure long-term migration. They use the UN's definition of a long-term migrant as someone who moves country for a year or more.
When it comes to National Insurance numbers, on the other hand, there is no minimum stay in the UK. Everyone who wants to work in the UK must have a National Insurance number, even if they're only working in the country for a few weeks.
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This one is a bit more of an editoral but still worth a read on why these figures aren't the disaster some papers are claiming:
https://next.ft.com/content/0110d2a4...7-a4af20d5575e
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The ONS could not have been clearer. The “missing millions” of EU migrants were a myth. They had been here but they had gone home. While Jonathan Portes of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research made reasoned arguments why the ONS might have been incorrectly reluctant to admit its data still had problems, the Vote Leave side ignored the ONS findings and changed the subject.
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So they were not groundbreaking figures released yesterday, even if The Telegraph is trying to make it seem like there was been double the amount of EU migration, and the story was overshadowed by the BBC charter renewal, the Vote Leave debate argument and the Tory expenses.