The recently-announced “fall in immigration due to fewer people arriving to study” story put out by the government is a bare-faced lie, a new report issued by MigrationWatch has revealed.
According to a statement put out by that organisation, the latest net migration statistics to March 2012 show a significant fall in net migration to 183,000–which amounts to a reduction of 59,000 from the figure for year ending March 2011.
According to the ONS News release “this reduction in immigration was largely due to fewer people arriving to study…”
In fact, the main reason was an increase in both British and non-EU emigration.
MigrationWatch pointed out that there was a fall in non EU immigration but only 12,000 of this came from a reduction of non-EU student immigration.
Separately, student visa data was also recently published and is more up to date as it includes the second and third quarters of 2012.
This data on applications for student visas is broken down by the type of institution; Higher education, further education, language schools and independent schools.
In the year ending September 2012 the total number of applications for student visas was 211,000 – a fall of 74,000 from the previous year.
However, it is important to segregate the different types of institution, MigrationWatch pointed out.
This overall fall was a result of applications to further education colleges falling from almost 100,000 in the whole year ending September 2011 to 33,000 in the following year.
Applications to universities (“Higher Education Institutions”) were actually UP by 1% at 155,800 compared with 154,500 for the previous year.
The fall in applications to colleges reflects the tightening of the system as well as measures to tackle bogus colleges and bogus students.
“To the extent that the fall is due to a reduction in bogus students, net migration will be unaffected in future years as those ‘students’ would not have left in any case,” MigrationWatch said.
Does the establishment ever stop lying? Apparently not.