EU migration rates are no problem for the UK – but you wouldn't know it by listening to the Brexiteers

One consequence of the new 'national living wage' may be not to make the UK an even more attractive destination for EU workers, but to price Britons into jobs they formerly rejected

The flags of Poland and Great Britain adorn flag poles along The Mall in London (Getty)

On the face of it, official figures released yesterday, showing a record number of EU citizens working in the UK, were a gift to the “Leave” campaign – and in nice time for the 23 June referendum, too. But the Brexiteers should not be allowed to get away with such simplistic and crowd-pleasing arguments as these.

There is a migration case to be brought against this government (and the last, and the one before that). But it is not about EU migration – or “free movement”, as it should rather be called. And the way in which several, quite different, questions have become entangled has confused the discussion in a thoroughly pernicious way.

The latest figures show that the number of EU workers in the UK has grown quite substantially in recent years. They now make up almost 7 per cent of the workforce, compared with almost 5 per cent three years ago and 2.6 per cent a decade ago.

You can present these figures in various ways: as a near-trebling of the EU workforce in Britain (true, but alarmist); or as a still modest proportion of all those working in the UK (true, and a positive comment on the capacity of our labour market).

The former Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, of course used the findings to stoke his case for leaving the EU. He had earlier spoken about the proportion of jobs on London Olympic sites taken by EU workers, largely because they were prepared to work for less.

To which the only response has to be to ask why he remained for so long a part – and a key part – of a government that denied EU workers had any detrimental effect on wage rates or the job chances of Britons.

It seems clear – to me, at least – that free movement of EU labour has driven down pay in particular sectors, construction being one of them, and kept pay low in others (hospitality, care, and so on), to the considerable advantage of the “haves” and the disadvantage of the “have-nots”.

But employment levels have been sustained, so the labour market has expanded. And low pay – which, with low productivity, has been a feature of the UK economy, thanks in part to the system of tax credits – is something that can be, and is belatedly being, addressed.

Over time, one consequence of the new “national living wage” may be not to make the UK an even more attractive destination for EU workers, as some Brexiteers are arguing, but to price Britons into jobs they formerly rejected as not worth their while. We shall see.

A more plausible reason for the increase in EU workers arriving over the past year especially would not be hope of higher pay, but fear that the open door might be about to close. The numbers may thus be, to a degree, artificial, fuelled more by the referendum itself, than by any vision of a workers’ paradise across the Channel.

Even then, to argue, as most Brexiteers do, that the UK would regain “control” of its borders, or at least its labour market, if we left the EU is not a given. It would depend wholly on the course subsequently chosen.

If we followed Norway or Switzerland and became part of the European Economic Area, free movement would continue. If we left the EEA – as some, including Boris Johnson, propose – the upside (from the perspective of those who want to curb EU migration) would be that the UK could choose who to admit from anywhere on, say, an Australian-type points system.

The downside would be the likely gaps in jobs and skills that would result, with the likely knock-on effect on living standards and GDP.

This is one aspect of the confusion, and to an extent the dishonesty, that afflicts discussion of EU migration and Brexit. But the other is the way European free movement has been subsumed into the question of migration to the UK in general. Each time the ONS releases a new set of statistics on “net migration”, the headlines tend to focus on arrivals of “new” Europeans, mainly Poles.

But this (conveniently for the Government and now the Brexiteers) highlights an aspect the UK cannot control - EU migration - while obscuring the Government’s signal failure significantly to reduce the numbers it can control.

It is true that the trajectory of EU migrant numbers has been up since the EU expansion of 2004, while that of non-EU migrants has been (slightly) down.

But the two figures are much closer than much of the reporting would suggest, and the preoccupation of Eurosceptics with EU migration has given ministers something of a free pass as far as reducing non-EU migration is concerned.

This is a distortion which suits quite a lot of people, including members of two powerful lobbies who fiercely oppose the sort of reductions in non-EU migration that would be needed for the net figure to come down.

One consists of big employers looking to recruit high-tech and medical staff on the cheap. The other is higher education, where non-EU students have become a cash cow funding seemingly perpetual expansion. Universities are campaigning to have students exempted from migration figures, but this is unlikely to happen so long as between a third and two-thirds do not return home.

Now, though, there is an interesting third lobby – one of whose spokespeople is Labour Brexiteer, Gisela Stuart. The MP, who represents a Birmingham constituency with a large South Asian population, says she is often asked why EU citizens can just move to the UK, no questions asked, while it is made so difficult for their own relatives to come.

That is a valid question, and one with the potential to add a still nastier angle to the referendum debate. But this is not where it belongs.

Migration from outside the EU is a topic that successive governments have managed to avoid by focusing so exclusively on EU migration. As they well know, it is dangerous and divisive territory.

With the movement of people from more distant parts of the world looming ever larger in and around Europe, however, it is a discussion we will have to have – regardless of whether we leave or remain.

But it is a different question, and it should be left until after that vote.