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Long stories short Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, received an 18-year jail sentence for helping plan the January 6th Washington insurrection.Alexander Lukashenko said Russia had started moving nuclear weapons into Belarus. Scientists discovered 5,000 new species in an area of the Pacific pegged for deep-sea mining. Big migrations New figures released yesterday showed net migration to the UK last year hit a record 606,000. Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, said: “Numbers are too high. It’s as simple as that.” But he can’t put a number on what the right levels would be. So what? More people arriving in the UK is technically good news for an economy with 1.1 million job vacancies and an additional 438,000 people not working because of long-term sickness since the pandemic. Much of the influx is due to people fleeing Ukraine, international students and much-needed workers, particularly in the care sector. But the Conservative Party is tearing itself apart because it has pledged to cut immigration for the past four elections. Ahead of the Brexit referendum, net migration stood at around 300,000. So it’s not going well.  Do the public care? Not so much. In Britain, the number of people who say there should be strict limits or an outright ban on immigration has more than halved from 66 per cent in 2016 to 31 per cent last year, according to one analysis of a study carried out by the Policy Institute at King’s College London.  A separate Ipsos survey last year found 46 per cent of people thought immigration had a positive effect on Britain, up from 35 per cent in 2015.   “Politicians often misread public opinion on immigration,” says Professor Bobby Duffy, director of the Policy Institute. “In the 2000s, Labour government rhetoric and policy on this issue was more relaxed than public preferences, and arguably they paid the price – but the current government is falling into the reverse trap.” By the numbers 1.2 million – total immigration to the UK last year. Most were non-EU nationals, at 925,000. 166,000 – total arrivals from Ukraine and Hong Kong in 2022. 101,570 – health and care visas issued in the year to March 2023, a 171 per cent increase on the previous year. 361,000 – non-EU arrivals on study visas last year, up from 301,000 in 2021. £11.40 – Lidl basic hourly wage after a pay rise this week, around £1 more per hour than the average for the care sector.  “The government chose to add care workers to the shortage occupation list… while at the same time using international migration as a main tool for recruiting nurses and doctors,” says Rob McNeil, the deputy director of Oxford university’s Migration Observatory. The Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), which advises ministers on policy, has called on the government to introduce better pay for care staff to make jobs more attractive for British workers.   Suella Braverman, the home secretary, preempted the migration figures this week by blocking most international students from bringing dependents – something that will particularly affect Nigerian (60,923 dependents of student visa holders last year) and Indian (38,990) students.  Britain relies on these students – a BBC analysis shows that they make up 22 per cent of university students but pay 42 per cent of fees. Alicia Kearns, a Conservative MP, says students shouldn’t be included in migration figures, in recognition of Britain’s educational soft power.  Choppy waters Rishi Sunak thinks he can win this argument by targeting asylum seekers crossing the Channel on small boats (these arrivals totalled 45,000 last year, around 4 per cent of total immigration).  But focusing on illegal migration ducks the harder questions like the demands that legal migration places on housing. The government’s target of building 300,000 homes a year – which it’s not meeting – was based on an assumption of annual net migration of 170,000.  There is currently room in public opinion for more “balanced conversation” on migration, says Duffy. The sooner that starts, the better. Also, in the nibs Germany’s coalition is squabbling over money Clean energy investment has overtaken fossil fuels America’s top court reduces clean water protections Two Sherpas compete for the most climbs up Everest Fulgence Kayishema has been run to ground Thanks for reading. Please tell your friends to sign up, send us ideas and tell us what you think. Email sensemaker@tortoisemedia.com. Photograph Omar Marques/Getty Images Choose which Tortoise newsletters you receive IN OUR MEMBERS’ APP

Long stories short Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, received an 18-year jail sentence for helping plan the January 6th Washington insurrection.Alexander Lukashenko said Russia had started moving nuclear weapons into Belarus. Scientists discovered 5,000 new species in an area of the Pacific pegged for deep-sea mining. Big migrations New figures released yesterday showed net migration to the UK last year hit a record 606,000. Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, said: “Numbers are too high. It’s as simple as that.” But he can’t put a number on what the right levels would be. So what? More people arriving in the UK is technically good news for an economy with 1.1 million job vacancies and an additional 438,000 people not working because of long-term sickness since the pandemic. Much of the influx is due to people fleeing Ukraine, international students and much-needed workers, particularly in the care sector. But the Conservative Party is tearing itself apart because it has pledged to cut immigration for the past four elections. Ahead of the Brexit referendum, net migration stood at around 300,000. So it’s not going well.  Do the public care? Not so much. In Britain, the number of people who say there should be strict limits or an outright ban on immigration has more than halved from 66 per cent in 2016 to 31 per cent last year, according to one analysis of a study carried out by the Policy Institute at King’s College London.  A separate Ipsos survey last year found 46 per cent of people thought immigration had a positive effect on Britain, up from 35 per cent in 2015.   “Politicians often misread public opinion on immigration,” says Professor Bobby Duffy, director of the Policy Institute. “In the 2000s, Labour government rhetoric and policy on this issue was more relaxed than public preferences, and arguably they paid the price – but the current government is falling into the reverse trap.” By the numbers 1.2 million – total immigration to the UK last year. Most were non-EU nationals, at 925,000. 166,000 – total arrivals from Ukraine and Hong Kong in 2022. 101,570 – health and care visas issued in the year to March 2023, a 171 per cent increase on the previous year. 361,000 – non-EU arrivals on study visas last year, up from 301,000 in 2021. £11.40 – Lidl basic hourly wage after a pay rise this week, around £1 more per hour than the average for the care sector.  “The government chose to add care workers to the shortage occupation list… while at the same time using international migration as a main tool for recruiting nurses and doctors,” says Rob McNeil, the deputy director of Oxford university’s Migration Observatory. The Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), which advises ministers on policy, has called on the government to introduce better pay for care staff to make jobs more attractive for British workers.   Suella Braverman, the home secretary, preempted the migration figures this week by blocking most international students from bringing dependents – something that will particularly affect Nigerian (60,923 dependents of student visa holders last year) and Indian (38,990) students.  Britain relies on these students – a BBC analysis shows that they make up 22 per cent of university students but pay 42 per cent of fees. Alicia Kearns, a Conservative MP, says students shouldn’t be included in migration figures, in recognition of Britain’s educational soft power.  Choppy waters Rishi Sunak thinks he can win this argument by targeting asylum seekers crossing the Channel on small boats (these arrivals totalled 45,000 last year, around 4 per cent of total immigration).  But focusing on illegal migration ducks the harder questions like the demands that legal migration places on housing. The government’s target of building 300,000 homes a year – which it’s not meeting – was based on an assumption of annual net migration of 170,000.  There is currently room in public opinion for more “balanced conversation” on migration, says Duffy. The sooner that starts, the better. Also, in the nibs Germany’s coalition is squabbling over money Clean energy investment has overtaken fossil fuels America’s top court reduces clean water protections Two Sherpas compete for the most climbs up Everest Fulgence Kayishema has been run to ground Thanks for reading. Please tell your friends to sign up, send us ideas and tell us what you think. Email sensemaker@tortoisemedia.com. Photograph Omar Marques/Getty Images Choose which Tortoise newsletters you receive IN OUR MEMBERS’ APP

Make sense of this week’s major news stories in a live editorial conference with Tortoise editors. Our daily digital ThinkIns are exclusively for Tortoise members and their guests.Try Tortoise free for four weeks to unlock your complimentary tickets to all our digital ThinkIns.If you’re already a member and looking for your ThinkIn access code you can find it in the My Tortoise > My Membership section of the app next to ‘ThinkIn access code’.We’d love you to join us.Last month the cries of a distressed toddler led Glasgow police to the body of his mother, a 34 year-old Ugandan asylum-seeker. Mercy Baguma could not work because of Covid, and she was an NRPF – with No Recourse to Public Funds because of her asylum status. She died in “extreme poverty”. Is there any justification for the system that let this happen, or is it, as Claudia Webbe MP has said, a stain on our collective soul?Chair: Giles Whittell, Editor and Partner, TortoiseSensemaker Live is in partnership with Santander.Our special guests include:Yvonne Blake is the co-founder of MORE (Migrants Organising for Rights and Employment) in Glasgow. She is a lifelong advocate of social justice, collective responsibility, lifelong and life-wide learning. Her activism focuses on providing practical support through capacity building, networking and skills sharing to empower the migrant community, which she believes are fundamental in the transformative process of black economic liberation and self-actualisation.How does a digital ThinkIn work?A digital ThinkIn is like a video conference, hosted by a Tortoise editor, that takes place at the advertised time of the event. Digital ThinkIns are new to Tortoise. Now that our newsroom has closed due to the coronavirus outbreak, we feel it’s more important than ever that we ‘get together’ to talk about the world and what’s going on.The link to join the conversation will be emailed to you after you have registered for your ticket to attend. When you click the link, you enter the digital ThinkIn and can join a live conversation from wherever you are in the world. Members can enter their unique members’ access code to book tickets. Find yours in My Tortoise > My Membership in the Tortoise app.If you have any questions or get stuck, please read our FAQs, or get in touch with us at memberhelp@tortoisemedia.comRead our ThinkIn code of conduct here.What is a Tortoise ThinkIn?A ThinkIn is not another panel discussion. It is a forum for civilised disagreement. It is a place where everyone has a seat at the (virtual) table. It’s where we get to hear what you think, drawn from your experience, energy and expertise. It is the heart of what we do at Tortoise.How we work with partners We want to be open about the business model of our journalism, too. At Tortoise, we don’t take ads. We don’t want to chase eyeballs or sell data. We don’t want to add to the clutter of life with ever more invasive ads. We think that ads force newsrooms to produce more and more stories, more and more quickly. We want to do less, better.Our journalism is funded by our members and our partners. We are establishing Founding Partnerships with a small group of businesses willing to back a new form of journalism, enable the public debate, share their expertise and communicate their point of view. Those companies, of course, know that we are a journalistic enterprise. Our independence is non-negotiable. If we ever have to choose between the relationship and the story, we’ll always choose the story.We value the support that those partners give us to deliver original reporting, patient investigations and considered analysis.We believe in opening up journalism so we can examine issues and develop ideas for the 21st Century. We want to do this with our members and with our partners. We want to give everyone a seat at the table.

Join a conversation with David Miliband, CEO of the International Rescue Committee about the impact of C-19 on refugees.

Worldwide the vast majority of asylum seekers come from failed and dangerous states to which they cannot return. Yet in many countries their status is a political football and their fates are determined by a process that requires them to prove first that they are not economic migrants. Britain is a case in point: internment pending verdict, no right to work and only a third of initial applications approved. What happened to common humanity? What is a Tortoise ThinkIn? A ThinkIn is not another panel discussion. It is a forum for civilised disagreement. Modelled on what we call a ‘leader conference’ in the UK (or an editorial board in the US), it is a place where everyone has a seat at the table. It’s where we get to hear what you think, drawn from your experience, energy and expertise. It’s where, together, we sift through what we know to come to a clear, concise point of view. It is the heart of what we do at Tortoise. Drinks from 6.30pm, starts promptly at 7pm.  Please note, latecomers won’t be admittedThinkIn tickets are included in all Tortoise memberships. There is no additional price to pay to attend a ThinkIn for members. Members can find their ThinkIn booking code in My Tortoise, under My Membership. Until Wednesday February 6 2019 only, non-members can enter the code SNOWYAY to book two complimentary tickets to any ThinkIn.