It comes from policy derived from the facts. These are the facts.
First, asylum. Asylum application numbers did rise after 1997, as they did in much of the rest of the EU, due to external pressures, but we have legislated to address the situation and the numbers have fallen rapidly. Asylum applications have fallen from over 8,000 a month at the peak in the autumn of 2002 to just over 2,000. The next set of statistics will show that monthly applications are back to their lowest level since March 1997, and have fallen twice as fast as in the rest of Europe.
Asylum applications are being dealt with far quicker than ten years ago. More than four in five asylum decisions are now made within two months. And far more of those whose claims are rejected are being removed - 12,430 removals in 2004, as against 4,820 in 1996. Now the facts on immigration. More people are entering the UK than was the case ten years ago to work or study. But that's precisely what one would want and expect with a strong and growing economy and world-class universities successful in attracting record numbers of international students, and helping to drive our knowledge-based economy.
Foreign students alone contribute £5bn to the UK economy, including a growing proportion of the funding for our universities. With unemployment half the rate it is in France or Germany and 600,000 vacancies, there are plenty of jobs that need doing.
But what Michael Howard doesn't point out is that net migration - the number of people entering the country, minus the number leaving - has actually been falling in recent years, and in 2003 was the lowest it has been since 1998.
Nor does he like to admit that, in international terms, we are not a high immigration country. Even today, we have lower levels of foreign-born nationals as a proportion of our total population than France or Germany and half the foreign born workforce proportion of the United States.
On illegal immigration, no-one, of course, knows precisely how many people are here illegally. Michael Howard himself admitted as much when he said in 1995: "There are no official estimates of the number of illegal immigrants into the United Kingdom. By its very nature, illegal immigration is difficult to measure and any estimates would be highly speculative".
So those are the facts. On asylum, there are continuing issues to be addressed to make the asylum system more efficient and effective - and on immigration, we have nothing to fear from legal immigration, and the issue is whether we are attracting as many of the highest value immigrants as we can, and what more we can do to crack down on illegal immigration.
