ONS announces huge rise in immigration but the numbers don't add up

Immigration has skyrocketed and David Cameron's promise to limit net immigration to 10s of thousands is being openly mocked, even within his own ranks.

A combination of falling emigration and increasing immigration has resulted in an 82,000 increase in net immigration to 336,000 people. That's increasing the population of the UK by the population of Wigan and Peterborough combined whilst the total number of immigrants who moved to the UK in the last year is larger than the population of Glasgow.

As predicted by UKIP, most newly arrived immigrants were from Romania and Bulgaria. They accounted for 50,000 new arrivals between them. The total number of EU immigrants working in the UK increased by 324,000 to 2,000,000 (two million) and 1 in 6 workers in the UK are foreign born.

The pro-immigration lobby are pointing to the 746,000 job vacancies as "evidence" that we need more immigration, conveniently ignoring the fact that unemployment is currently running at 1,700,000 (1.7 million) or almost 2.3 unemployed people for every job vacancy.

But the figures announced by the Office of National Statistics are interesting because despite emigration reducing by 20,000 and net immigration increasing by 82,000 the gross immigration figure is supposedly still 636,000 which is the figure quoted in August for the year to March. The numbers don't add up. Gross immigration has to be more like 718,000 with illegal immigration and overstayed visas pushing the number well over three quarters of a million. We said that the end of year figures would be interesting but didn't think that it would be because they appear to have been fiddled!