Dave's immigration woes are of his own making

A more cunning prime minister would have been able to boast about today’s immigration figures. ‘Look’, he would say, ‘our economy is on the up, more people are in work than ever before and more of those jobs are going to hardworking Britons.

‘With careful handling of our finances, we have begun the task of tackling the economic disaster we inherited, saved it from the abyss and now we are focusing on securing the economy.

‘On top of all of this, people from across Europe are now flocking to our shores, seeing us as a place of security, of resilience, of vitality, coming here eager to work and build our economy, helping to secure the prosperity that we all want.’

But whatever he is, David Cameron is not a cunning prime minister. Playing the anti-immigration card is an easy election ploy, especially in the midst of the deepest recession for a century. It pleases his backbenchers and taps into the public’s unease; providing voters with a more realistic immigration policy was never really on the cards.

So, instead, as more net migration hits more than 212,000, David Cameron’s pledge to reduce this to below 100,000 looks completely unachievable and it will be for others, UKIP and his increasingly restless backbenchers, to take the spoils.

It was ever going to be thus. The largest number of migrants coming to this country come from the European Union and the government has practically no power to restrict this movement (the restrictions that did limit Romanian and Bulgarian migration lifted at the start of this year). The prime minister can talk as much as he wants about renegotiating our relationship with Europe but this isn’t going to make any significant progress before the next election.

The government know this is happening. In an interview published this week in Total Politics magazine, David Willetts, minister for universities and science, while claiming there was a surge of students from China, admitted the curbs had ‘played disappointingly badly’ in India with numbers falling by 38 per cent between 2011 and 2012.

So it leaves the government vulnerable from all sides on immigration. Those who believe in the free movement of people and think immigration has and continues to enrich Britain attack the government for harming universities with their restrictions and deterring people who could contribute. While anti-immigration voices and those on the right, from MigrationWatch and UKIP, shout louder about leaving the EU and call for stricter controls to be introduced.

And everyone, in unison, can accuse the government of losing control of their own policy.