If you’ve ever had a particularly bad day at work, don’t worry, it could be worse: you could have distorted seven years of British policy-making. The Office for National Statistics has vastly overestimated the number of foreign students overstaying their visas. It had put the number from overseas staying past their visas at more than 100,000 a year. The actual figure is 4,700.
In order to “get numbers down”, Theresa May, first as home secretary and thereafter as Prime Minister, sharply limited the freedoms of overseas students to come to the United Kingdom in the first place, and oversaw increasing levels of graduate deportation. Meanwhile, the accompanying furore over the numbers overstaying very probably helped take Britain out of the European Union.
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