The footprint of Britain's immigrants - and emigrants - is important

Half a million people. That’s quite a lot, isn’t it? I mean, half a million here, half a million there, why, soon you’re talking a million, which is even more of a nice round figure. But that’s the statistic we should be talking about when it comes to the migration stats today from the Office for National Statistics. The crucial figure tucked away in there is in fact 542,000, which is the number of people who came to Britain in the year up to September 2014, excluding returning Brits. And of these foreign immigrants, non-EU citizens were the majority, 292,000 of them. That, I think, is more significant than the little game we play in working out net migration, which, as Vince Cable never tires of telling us, depends on the numbers of emigrating Brits which the government can’t do anything about.