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The coalition may gain a shortlived uplift from this sop to the right, but where's the data on its likely economic effect?
From yesterday there was a new cap on immigration: this is a longstanding Tory promise. Indeed I thought I remembered it from the televised debates, but what I was actually remembering was Michael Howard's ill-fated, handwritten "My mum wrote a shopping list and then put me a little policy at the bottom" poster campaign, which read: "It's not racist to impose limits on immigration." (Someone defaced this with a simple, "Yes it is, Tory scum!")
If you take the polls and you marry them to any precept of democracy, imposing limits on immigration is exactly what should be done. Three-quarters of British people, according to recent surveys, want to reduce immigration. So it must be reduced, particularly since this public desire is no recent development; in fact it has been simmering for the last 15 years.
However, those figures are more vexed than they look. Indeed, amble around Oxford's Migration Observatory: it's a number-crunching organisation trying to bring some clarity to the issue by presenting readable data, as clean as they can get it – which is "not very". Almost no statistic in migration is without caveat. People may be against migration in theory but that alters with the wording of the question: specifically, it depends how you define "migrants". The public tends to be against illegal migration (which no government can cap, since it all happens informally). Yet other migrants – those staying on after a student visa, those on a working visa who have come to work for the NHS – are pretty popular. Despite this much-mentioned 75% opposition, people don't connect their opposition to the migrants they know personally.
But if those figures are incomplete, that is nothing compared to the patchiness of the data on numbers of migrants themselves: there's such limited information on emigrants that net migration is way off. The three data sources on immigrants never agree with each other.
Local area statistics are so poor that there's a council in Devon that cites 4,000 migrants with a margin of error of 4,000. That's not the fault of this government but it is their reality. The fact is that they do not know enough to make the promises they're making. They know that, but they're relying on the fact that we don't know enough to notice. It would be melodramatic to call the cap a disaster: more accurately, it's a waste of time, a bauble; the sort of thing that one week in power should have persuaded them to abandon.
First, the immigration cap only applies to the inflow of non-European Union residents. And it doesn't so far apply to non-EU student immigrants, or those whose eligibility is based on family ties. It only applies to labour applications, themselves only 20% of the non-EU inflow – which in turn is a drop in the ocean of total inflow. These working visas are estimated to account for 5% of net migration, and that is a generous estimate: some studies put them at 1%. Then there are the exemptions: intercompany transfers are exempt, and those are historically the biggest share of workforce immigration from outside Europe.
OK, let's say they ended all exemptions. Even if they shut down any movement at all from the labour force outside the EU, it wouldn't produce a fall in net migration that would hit even tens of thousands. This cohort is just too small, and capping it changes nothing unless you count the vexation to the people so arbitrarily refused entry and the reassurance to a few Ukip voters who couldn't be arsed to look at the figures.
In order to make any real difference to the figures the government has to go after student entry, which accounts for 60% of non-EU migration. Theresa May claims already to have cut the numbers by 80,000 just by raising the standard of English requirement and axing the two-year post-study period when students would previously have been allowed to work.
Statisticians are sceptical about how these modifications could deliver such a reduction, but even if it were true there would still be big trouble ahead. Non-EU postgraduates pay very high fees: in many universities they're cross-subsidising British undergraduates.
At a lower level non-EU students who come to the UK to learn English contribute a huge amount to the economy, as raised by Brighton Pavilion MP Caroline Lucas last year when she noted that in Brighton and Hove alone, they brought in £105m a year. No impact assessment on student inflow has been sought by the government from the agencies dealing with net migration, presumably because they don't intend to limit student visas. The area is too important to the economy, and the numbers are great. Cap them? You may as well cap tourism.
Where does that leave the coalition in its bold promise to reduce immigration? It could secede from the EU altogether and boot out Europeans; it could rip up the rules on migration for family reasons, which would most likely involve ducking out of all human rights legislation; or it could find more accurate information on immigration to start with. Soon enough it would be clear that "cap it", never mind the similarity of tone, is as nonsensical, meaningless and impracticable as "Send 'em back".