The Referendum by Numbers: Immigration
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 14 June 2016
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
If it seems the EU referendum debate just involves two politicians shouting contradictory statistics at each other - then we are here to help. In this series, we're giving you a break from the politicians and we're going to try to figure out the truth. Bracing concept, isn't it? We'll be looking at some of the big questions - The cost of the EU, lawmaking, regulations and trade. In th secomd of these programmes Tim Harford asks what might happen to migration if we left the EU, and what are the benefits and costs of EU migrants to the UK economy?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the second in this special series of more or less looking at the |
| 0:11.3 | EU referendum. Today, immigration. What might happen to |
| 0:16.1 | migration if we left the EU and what are the economic benefits and costs of |
| 0:21.2 | EU migrants. |
| 0:23.0 | But first, what is the situation today? |
| 0:26.0 | How many citizens from elsewhere in the EU are currently living in the UK? |
| 0:30.0 | I asked Madeline Sumption, the director of the Migration Observatory. |
| 0:34.0 | If you look at the number of EU-born people living in the UK |
| 0:38.0 | back around 2000, it was just over a million people, it's gone up to just over 3 million people an increase of about 160% |
| 0:47.4 | and is that because of new countries joining the European Union or a change in the rules or something else? |
| 0:53.0 | A large part of it is because of new countries joining the European Union. |
| 0:57.0 | A lot of the growth that we saw took place between 2004 and 2009 or so, |
| 1:02.0 | and that was countries particularly Poland then also Romania |
| 1:06.4 | Joining the European Union and they had access for the first time to the UK labor market |
| 1:11.6 | There has also recently been an increase in people from older |
| 1:15.4 | EU countries, places like Spain, Italy, and Portugal for example that have had access to the |
| 1:20.2 | UK for a long time but where unemployment has been high recently and so we've |
| 1:24.4 | seen somewhat larger numbers of those people coming here as well. |
| 1:28.2 | So the number is growing but by how much? |
| 1:31.2 | The answer is a bit of a mystery itself. The official statistics show that |
| 1:36.2 | net migration to the UK has typically been between 200,000 and 300,000 a year for the past decade or so. Those numbers are very high by historical |
| 1:47.2 | standards, although well over half of that net migration has been from outside the EU. In 2015 net migration the number of people who've |
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