Keir Starmer’s response to the 69% fall in net migration revealed in official figures last week was to remark: “That’s a step in the right direction.”Describing a reduction of more than two-thirds of any indicator in a single year as a “step” would be a creative use of statistics, putting it kindly.But on this most polarising of topics, and for the prime minister, whose job it is to shape public opinion, not cower before it (to “teach”, as the longtime political commentator Steve Richards calls it), it was inexcusable.Starmer’s insouciance about the collapse in numbers – from 649,000 last year to 204,000 in the year to June – was just the latest example of how damagingly detached from reality political debate about migration has become.Since Brexit, net migration has been on a rollercoaster ride more dramatic than anything at Alton Towers – a record rise followed in short order by a record decline.

Chairing a panel discussion on this issue at the Bristol festival of economics this month, I was struck by two telling points made by Brian Bell, the chair of the independent Migration Advisory Committee, which advises the Home Office.First, and contrary to Starmer’s claim last year that Boris Johnson deliberately engaged in a “one-nation experiment in open borders”, Bell described the extraordinary increase in net migration that followed Brexit and the Covid pandemic as “an accident”.He cited three factors.First, the Homes for Ukraine scheme and the decision to allow Hong Kong citizens with British passports to come to the UK.“All politicians said that was a good idea, but that gave us 200,000 migration in one year, and additionally, some Hong Kong citizens because of the crackdown from the Chinese authorities,” he said.

Second were the pressures facing UK universities as they emerged from the pandemic facing soaring inflation and the continuing freeze on tuition fees – and turned to enrolling a growing number of foreign students to fill the gap.“There was a strong incentive to increase the number of international students, and universities went very heavily on that: the numbers were really very, very substantial,” Bell said.They really were: from about 200,000 a year in the 2000s, the number of student visas peaked at more than 650,000 in the year to June 2023.Third was the decision – again in the aftermath of the pandemic, with the NHS and care homes under intense pressure – to extend healthcare visas so that care workers, many of whom would otherwise be too low-paid to qualify for a skilled worker visa, could come to the UK.And come they did, despite challenging work, long hours and often paltry earnings.

There was another way to deal with the social care sector’s struggle to recruit.The government could have ramped up funding to local authorities to pay workers significantly more – making the jobs more attractive to UK candidates than, say, working on a checkout in a supermarket.Labour is inching towards this approach with its promise of a fair pay agreement for social care, which will result in employers and trade unions negotiating the terms of a new deal on pay and conditions, which the government will then enforce across the sector.Sign up to Business TodayGet set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morningafter newsletter promotionThe health secretary, Wes Streeting, has set aside £500m to sweeten the deal, intended to come into force in April 2028.However, experts say this won’t go very far, and Labour still has nothing to say about the wider question of how social care can be sustainably funded.

That was Bell’s second telling point: rising immigration has tended to be a side-effect of the failure to deal with some other pressing social issue rather than an end in itself – a kind of reverse escape valve for crap policymaking.“It’s almost always that where there’s big immigration numbers, the problem is somewhere else in government not addressing an underlying problem.”It would have been surprising if such an extraordinarily rapid rise in net migration had not bubbled up into political debate, particularly at a time of stagnant real wages in the wider economy and a few years after the Brexit vote, many of whose supporters were motivated in part by scepticism about EU free movement.And especially in the polarised age of social media.Part of that has been driven by concern about asylum seekers and refugees – a small but highly salient proportion of the total, and one that the new home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has set her sights on reducing.

However, when it comes to mainstream migration routes such as work visas, Conservative ministers tightened the rules considerably in 2024.And experts had long predicted a rise in emigration, following a few years behind the rise in foreign students: because most tend to leave after their courses end.In other words, net migration was set to fall dramatically.There are valid issues to address about how best to integrate the many people who arrived at the peak of the “Boriswave”, as Starmer now calls it: a phrase originally coined by the online far right.While much political debate is still conducted as though the UK has thrown open its borders to all-comers, in fact it may not be long before concerns are mounting about how particular sectors will cope with the drop-off in arrivals, with social care at the frontier.

It is hard to imagine Labour winning the argument about this supercharged issue without some sense of what they believe the right migration outcome for the UK would look like apart from “less”,That must surely start from an honest acknowledgment that net migration is already plunging,That would really be “a step in the right direction”,