One hundred thousand more EU migrants came to the UK every year over the past decade than was thought, the latest figures suggest.
But non-EU migrants were 54,000 a year lower than official estimates since 2012, according to the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.
Overall, net immigration was 43,000 higher each year since 2012 — 15 per cent more than official estimates.
The research suggests that government policy on immigration has been based on inaccurate and unreliable data for a decade. This included David Cameron’s doomed target to reduce net migration to the “tens of thousands” as it was targeting non-EU migration, which turned out to be much lower than the government thought, while immigration from the EU, which Britain could not control,