Immigration: What Labour, Conservative or UKIP will not tell you

Politicians of all parties with exception of the British National Party have lamentably failed to tell the truth about how immigration has changed this country beyond recognition during Labour's 13 years in power. Here JAMES SLACK explains what is really happening...

NET MIGRATION
Net inward migration to the UK, the difference between the number of people arriving and leaving, is up threefold since Labour came to power. In 1997, it stood at 48,000. By 2004, fuelled by a surge in new arrivals from Eastern Europe, it reached an all-time record 244,000, and in 2007 it was 237,000. The following year it did begin to fall, Mr Brown suggested the as-yet-unpublished figure for 2009 would be 147,000. But this was incomplete data which excluded asylum seekers, visitors who decide to stay long-term and arrivals from Ireland and earned the Premier earned a swift rebuke from Sir Michael Scholar, chairman of the UK Statistics Authority. The Tories have pledged to reduce the level of net migration to 'tens of thousands' - but have yet to specify a number.

POPULATION GROWTH
The Office for National Statistics projects that - based on current levels of migration - the UK's population of 61million, will grow to 70million by 2029. The figure has become a battleground between the Government and those pushing for stricter immigration controls. Home Secretary Alan Johnson initially said he did not 'lie awake' worrying about such rapid growth. He is now insisting the ONS figure is only a projection and that the statisticians have been wrong in the past. The number of immigrants living in Britain has almost doubled in less than three decades. The total foreign-born population now stands at 6.7million.

JOBS
Mr Brown's now notorious 'British jobs for British workers' pledge is fatally undermined by employment figures from the ONS. These show that, in the private sector, there were 288,000 fewer UK-born people working in the third quarter of last year than there were in 1997. Mr Brown likes to include people working beyond pension age as 'new jobs' - but if you strip them out, there are 637,000 fewer. Overall, immigration has accounted for more than 1.64million of the 1.67million jobs created since 1997.

THE BLACK ECONOMY
For much of the last decade, Britain has been a magnet for illegal immigration and it has never been possible to put a definitive figure on the numbers entering this way. Migrants mass at the Sangatte refugee camp near Calais, then smuggle themselves into the UK, often hidden in lorries. The stowaways vanish into a black economy estimated to be worth billions of pounds. Commonly, illegal immigrants work in kitchens, agricultural and construction jobs. Immigration staff, struggling to cope with a backlog of asylum claims, do not have the resources to track them down. During the 2005 election campaign, Tony Blair repeatedly refused to estimate how many illegals were living here. A month after being re-elected, his Government produced an estimate of 570,000. The campaign group Migrationwatch says the true total could be as high as 870,000. Some Labour ministers have flirted with calling an 'amnesty' but it has been rejected as electorally unpopular.

CITIZENSHIP
Handing out passports to foreign nationals is how the Labour Government changed the make-up of society for ever. In 1997 just 37,010 people were given citizenship. Last year the Home Office approved an all-time record 203,865 applications, an increase of 58 per cent in a year. In total, Labour has now created 1.5million new British citizens - all with full voting rights. Ministers have repeatedly promised to toughen citizenship rules, most recently by insisting migrants must earn a passport by doing voluntary work.

STUDENT VISAS
In 1998, the number of visas handed out to overseas students was 69,607. In 2008/9, this figure had risen to 236,470. The Government's own figures suggest more than one in ten of the foreign students studying in this country last year was sponsored by a bogus college. At least 1.5million student visas have been handed out in the past eight years alone. The beneficiaries included Christmas Day transatlantic flight bomb suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab - given permission by the Home Office to study mechanical engineering at University College London between 2005 and 2008. A string of other terror suspects have used the student visa route into the UK.

THE SECRET PLAN
Arguably, the most damaging charge of them all. New Labour's election manifestos made little or no mention of immigration policy. But according to a draft report by the Cabinet Office, written in 2000, ministers had a secret plan to 'maximise the contribution' of migrants to the Government's 'social objectives'.Former Labour advisor Andrew Neather, who worked on the report, said the aim was to 'rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.' The Daily Mail