Of all the essential tasks facing Rishi Sunak when he became Prime Minister, bringing down the level of legal immigration should have been by far the most straightforward.
This is probably not what the electorate had in mind when voting for Brexit in order to ‘take back control’ of the borders
All he had to do was tweak student and work visa requirements to ensure a significant fall from the gargantuan 606,000 net migration number bequeathed to him by Boris Johnson. He could then have tried to sell the idea to Tory-leaning voters that a downward direction of travel had been set in motion, with further down payments on the way (as Jeremy Hunt attempted to do with taxation yesterday).
Instead, the ONS has just published its new estimate for net migration in the 12 months to the end of June 2023 and the number is 672,000. That figure encompasses an astonishing 1.2
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