Debunking the ‘Brexodus’ myth

A new word has entered the lexicon – Brexodus – to reflect the claim that Europeans are leaving in droves as they shun post-Brexit Britain.

But it is a funny sort of Brexodus which leaves the number of European nationals in Britain at an all-time high. While the quarterly immigration figures did show a significant reduction in the scale of EU immigration to the UK, and a rise in the number of Europeans departing, those figures also showed that twice as many Europeans came to the UK as departed from it, with an estimated 122,000 EU nationals leaving the UK while 249,000 arrived in the year to March 2017.

There have been significant changes to migration from eastern Europe. The post-2004 migration from Poland and the other seven accession states was the largest in modern British history. The number of Poles resident in the UK reached a million for the first time in the statistics released last week.