David Cameron immigration speech: Assessing the PM's figures
Taking in everything from student visas, economic migration, and impact of the cap introduced by the coalition, Mr Cameron's argument today represented something of a roll call of topics Full Fact has looked at during the past few months.
So how did the Prime Minister's message fare under Full Fact scrutiny?
1. "What's more, we're closing the loophole that has allowed people who have worked here illegally to get unemployment benefits. Estimates suggest that as many as 155,000 illegal workers might be able to do this".
Earlier this year we were left scratching our heads when this figure of 155,000 illegal workers claiming benefits surfaced in the papers.
It transpired the figure came from an Impact Assessment produced by the Department for Work and Pensions on the effects of introducing a requirement to prove eligibility to work as a condition of receiving benefits.
The 155,000 is based on the rough assumption that the proportion of illegal workers claiming benefits is the same as the proportion of estimated illegal workers relative to the working age population.
However as Mr Cameron rightly points out, this is only an estimate for the number of people who could theoretically be eligible to claim.
When Full Fact added up the number of people DWP estimated would actually be affected by the new requirement, it seemed it was only about 8,570.
2. "Tier one visas were supposed to be reserved for only the highest skilled migrants. But the evidence shows almost a third of people who came over on one of these visas were not employed in highly skilled jobs."
When Full Fact inspected this claim last year, we traced it back to a piece of UK Border Agency research that contained one significant caveat.
While it did show 29 per cent of those on Tier 1 visas working in 'unskilled' work versus 25 per cent in skilled work — the situation of 46 per cent of the 1,146 sample was recorded as "unclear".
According to the report this meant that the results were "indicative rather than definitive".
When we looked into this last autumn we found another Home Office study that suggests 20 per cent were in unskilled work and a further 10 per cent were unemployed, somewhat vindicating the PM.
There is one other aspect to this claim, which is the role of recent graduates of UK universities from outside the EU. In the past such people have been able to apply for Tier 1 visas to stay on as economic migrants after their student visas expired.
In the UKBA report last October, 44 per cent of the skilled migrants doing 'unskilled' or unemployed work were recent graduates. In light of the difficulties faced by recent graduates in the jobs market, it makes it less surprising that such people would not all be in high skilled jobs.
But Mr Cameron's assertion is still, to an extent, backed up by the figures.
3. "Since 1997, the number of people in work in our economy has gone up by some 2.5 million. And of this increase, around 75 per cent was accounted for by foreign-born workers "
The issue of changes of employment broken down by country of birth has been one which we have covered time and again on Full Fact.
Frequently the figures used by Mr Cameron are phrased in terms of X per cent of 'new jobs' going to 'foreigners'.
Since the number of people in work isn't the same as the number of new jobs, and the foreign-born could also include British nationals, we have often taken issue with how newspapers have used these kind of figures.
So it is welcome that Mr Cameron has stuck to what the figures actually show in his speech.
Taking the fourth quarter figures from the Office for National Statistics for 1997 and 2010 as a guide, it can be seen that there were 25,298,000 UK born people in work at the end of the period compared to 24,681,000 at the start — a rise of 617,000. Over the same period the was a change from 2,013,000 foreign born workers to 3,893,000.
This means that of the 2,497,000 more people in work, 1,880,000 or about 75 per cent, were born abroad.
4. "In recent years there has also grown up a thriving industry of bogus colleges, providing bogus qualifications as cover for bogus visas. Of the 744 private colleges on the UK Border Agency sponsor register in January, only 131 had attained highly trusted sponsor status.
"Yet, as of mid-January this year, the 613 private colleges who are not "highly trusted" have been able to sponsor 280,000 students between them. The potential for abuse is clearly enormous."
The issue of the bogus colleges and how many students are attending them has proved a tricky subject for us to factcheck recently.
We have repeatedly tried to get hold of UK Border Agency data referenced by ministers on the issue, but because the information is not classed as 'official statistics' there is no requirement for the data to be published — even if it is quoted by ministers.
This has thwarted our attempts to assess how significant the capacity of institutions that are not accorded highly trusted status to issue visas.
This meant that, just as when these figures were used by Immigration Minister Damian Green in February, there seems to be no published source which would help us to put them in context.
Helpfully, the Home Office did publish data on non-attendance rates for students attending privately funded further education institutions — allowing some light to be shed on abuse. From a sample of nearly 1,000 students, non-attendance rates at privately funded institutions were about 11 per cent — although no breakdown is given for institutions by whether they are 'highly trusted'.
Conclusion
In all the cases examined above there is important context to the figures used by the Prime Minister.
That said, none of the claims made by Mr Cameron can be said to be inaccurate, but the details that in some cases are glossed over must kept in mind given the contentious issue being addressed.
UPDATE: When we first published this factcheck, section 2 stated "When we looked into this last autumn we did reference another Home Office study that did suggest 20 per cent were in unskilled work and a further 10 per cent were unemployed, somewhat vindicating the PM. Sadly the Home Office have moved the survey findings, but when we track them down we will link to them." We are very grateful to staff at the Home Office for spotting the absence and pointing us in the right direction following their website redesign.