Migration is one of the biggest issues in society right now, but also in the election. But what do the numbers actually tell you? Let's have a look at them. It's striking, isn't it? So much of the talk at the moment is about small boats, small boats arrivals. Actually, you can see, yes, the numbers are rising. They're bumpy depending on the season, but 30,000 in the past 12 months, the highest they've been for quite some time. But how does that compare with the other bits of migration that we know about? So that's small boats. Now bring on other asylum seekers, that's considerably higher. Now bring on other legal reasons for migration, so work, study, and other reasons. Legal migration utterly, utterly dowfs the illegal small boat side of things. And then if you add on other reasons, more recently, like Ukraine, people coming in from Ukraine and from Hong Kong. That's considerable as well. But really, it's study and it's work, and people who are dependents coming in for those reasons that are by far and away dominating this story. It's very different from the overall narrative that we tend to hear about. But one thing that certainly is clear is when If you look at the overall picture, this is net migration as a percentage of the population going all the way back to 1855.

This is unprecedented what we're going through right now. Look at this line. I'm going to bring on the last year. We've never seen that line as high as it's been recently. And this is going back a long way. People are right to be concerned about this because it is unprecedented. That is perhaps why you've got a lot of politicians saying they want to do something about it. Of course, Rishi Sunak. He said that we have a clear plan to stop the boats and put a legal Cap on numbers. That raises, of course, the issue of whether these caps can actually work. Most famously, there was a cap put in place by David Cameron, net migration in the tens of thousands. What actually happened? Look at the bars. That's net migration, of course, immigration minus emigration. It never went below that line. Obviously, then you had the pandemic, then the post-Brexit rules came into force, and look at what happened next. That is why we got to those extraordinarily high numbers recently. But speaking of Brexit, there's someone else who certainly has a view on this. That's Nigel Farage, reform leader, saying net migration should be zero.

But here's the thing. In the reform manifesto, it says strict limits on immigration. It doesn't say net zero migration. And essential skills, mainly around healthcare, must be the only exception. So healthcare, that raises a question. If you're just letting skilled workers, healthcare workers in, what's that to do with the numbers? Well, let's bring in these numbers, again, on immigration by type of work. So type of work here, temporary, other, and skilled as well. There's other skilled. But look at the increase we've had recently in health and care. Basically, it's because of this that the NHS has kept going, because of an enormous increase. In fact, over 100,000 in the past year alone. That seemingly, over 100,000 migration will be consistent with reform's position.