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New data today from @ONS on the migrant population in the year ending June 2020. Shows a modest (2.6% or 246,000) decline in non-UK born population. BUT there are some important caveats because Covid has disrupted data collection.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/ukpopulationbycountryofbirthandnationality/yearendingjune2020
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/ukpopulationbycountryofbirthandnationality/yearendingjune2020
Based on what we know from quarterly data, the decline was mostly driven by the final quarter of this period, i.e. April-June 2020. We're pretty sure that net migration plummeted during that period, but not sure by how much, because the normal data sources are gone (e.g. the IPS)
As @ONS has made clear, we know that non-response bias changed due to Covid and the resulting changes in how people were contacted to be in the study - i.e. the profile of people who didn't participate in the survey changed and this affected the results.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/methodologies/labourforcesurveyperformanceandqualitymonitoringreports/labourforcesurveyperformanceandqualitymonitoringreportapriltojune2020
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/methodologies/labourforcesurveyperformanceandqualitymonitoringreports/labourforcesurveyperformanceandqualitymonitoringreportapriltojune2020
It's likely that migrants and the UK-born population will have been affected differently by these changes. There's lots of evidence that migrants respond differently to survey data collection efforts as I discuss in a recent article for @data_and_policy https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/data-and-policy/article/how-useful-are-survey-data-for-analyzing-immigration-policy/827DE691127A60700DECAE8522796890
So: while it's very likely that Covid has in fact massively disrupted migration, we'll need to be cautious about the data for 2020, especially when the next figures come out covering more of the pandemic period.
What we CAN say is that the migrant population no longer appears to be growing. It may well have decreased but we'll have to wait for more data sources (including the exciting and much awaited @ONS admin-based migration estimates) hopefully by the end of this year to confirm that
