Moving Up and Getting On is about migrant integration and how migrants impact on broader social cohesion. But migrants are a diverse group – in relation to their countries of origin, their routes into the UK, their experiences here and their long-term aspirations. For those concerned with integration and social cohesion, it is important to understand the nature of migration flows, as well as to look at migrants’ specific demographic and social characteristics as they may affect integration and social cohesion. This chapter provides this background.

Migration flows

The main sources of quantitative data about international migration flows into the UK are survey data and administrative data from the Home Office, for example, visa or asylum statistics. Definitions of ‘migrant’ vary between different datasets, and also between datasets and immigration law. It is also important to remember that these differing definitions have consequences for the analysis of data on migration flows, as well as on public policy (Anderson and Blinder, 2014). For example, there is a strongly held belief among local government leaders that the main method of estimating migration flows into specific regions and overall flows into the UK – the International Passenger Survey - under-estimates the numbers of migrants because of the way it defines them.

The International Passenger Survey and the Labour Force Survey draw from the UN definition of a migrant as a person who moves to a country other than that of his or her usual residence for a period of at least a year. Although international migration has always been a feature of life in the UK, both immigration and emigration have increased since the early 1990s as shown in Figure 2.1. Increased immigration has been caused by higher numbers of asylum arrivals in the 1990s, sustained student and work-visa flows and large-scale migration from the EU's new member states after 2004. The increase in emigration over the same period has been caused by the greater propensity of UK nationals to migrate, as well as proportionally more return and onward migration among those who have previously migrated into the UK (Sriskandarajah and Drew, 2006; Finch et al, 2009).