There are three things that we might be interested in.
The first is that, if you look at the number of deaths and you look at the number of births, deaths exceeded births. That is to say that the rate of natural increase is negative.
What that actually means, is that if net migration was zero, then the population of Scotland would decline.
So that means the only reason it is growing is because the net migration is positive, at 32,000.
The only way that the population of Scotland is going to grow in the future is if net migration is positive or you have large and sustained increases in fertility, and that’s not going to happen.
Ask your daughters and your grand-daughters at university and they’re not going to turn around and have four kids.
It is an interesting situation and what it does is it focuses on the immigration.
The second point is that we have a situation where the only reason the population is growing is because net migration is positive, which is critical for the labour force and people of labour force age.
The people of working age is only going to increase slightly, by one per cent.
Unless you have this 32,000, which is a relatively high level of net migration, then your labour force may not even grow to that.
In other words, the current situation implies not much if any labour force growth in the future and all that is dependent on net migration being positive.
If the net migration isn’t positive, then the population shrinks and the labour force shrinks.
My own view is that the overall population growth is a bit of a red herring.
What is important is the rate of growth of the labour force.
The third point is that if you look at who the immigrants are, half are from the EU and the other half are from the rest of the world.
Once you leave with Brexit the door is going to be shut to basically half the immigrants coming to Scotland.
This will be devastating in terms of our economy because it will really have a heavy knock-on effect on the labour force.
We are much more dependent on bringing in foreign workers than the UK as a whole.
Once the door is shut, this is really going to hurt Scotland.
They shut the door, then the people that want to come from EU countries will have to apply in a points based system.
You can understand why political parties in Scotland are not happy about this from the workers point of view.
The registrar general is reinforcing in this report the importance of having an immigration system post Brexit that works as well as the system we have in place.
Robert Wright, Professor of Economics at Strathclyde University Business School.
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