They say it's impossible to cut immigration. They're wrong What can be done about immigration? The accepted answer in many quarters is: nothing. Twenty years ago, there used to be a similar consensus in the Home Office about crime: it's bound to go up, so all anyone in government can do is manage expectations, and try to persuade people to live with it. If you try to do anything else, you will fail. This attitude is on show again in the latest report from the Institute for Public Policy Research. It predicts that after a small fall, net immigration (the total number of people arriving here, minus the total leaving) will rise inexorably as the Government "runs out of options for reducing immigration in any significant way," not least because of the constraints of EU membership. The clear implication is that we had better get used to having around 200,000 additional foreigners coming to live here every year - or about a million extra people every five years, most of them squashed into the South East of England. This depressing scenario underestimates both the extent to which policies can diminish immigration, and the degree to which the Government is determined to achieve a significant fall. The latest figures (from March 2011 to March 2012) showed net immigration of around 180,000 - an astonishing figure, but still a drop of nearly 60,000 from the year before. That was mostly the result of much tougher restrictions on foreign students. The Government identified a large number of bogus colleges, where people paid a fee and then had no further contact with the "school": as a consequence, the number of accredited institutions fell from 6,000 to 2,200. Proper universities were largely unaffected, but people using bogus colleges as a way into work, whether in restaurants or IT, discovered that the route was blocked: as a result, the number of visa applications for "study" dropped by tens of thousands. The Government's next target is Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the "right to family life." Invoking this has been one of the easiest ways in which foreigners have been able to gain the right to stay here - even when convicted by our courts of assault, rape, or even murder. Part of the explanation for the way Article 8 has turned into a ticket to citizenship is that our judges have tended to interpret it as absolute - which it is not. It is a qualified right, to be balanced against other considerations, such as public safety and the general public interest. Last June, Theresa May told the Commons that she proposed to make a number of changes to the way the article was interpreted by the courts. Their essence is that, contrary to many judicial rulings over the last decade, it need not be a violation of the right to family life for a foreigner to be separated from his family. If someone is convicted of a serious crime, deporting them won't violate their right to family life: if the children are important to them, they can join them overseas. And if an immigrant wants to bring in a spouse from outside the EU, they will have to possess a minimum income of £18,600 - the cut-off point for housing benefit and tax credit. If they want to bring in three children, they will have to have an income of £27,200. Senior officials in the UK Borders Agency tell me they are confident that this combination of restrictions will put a lot of people off. In the mid-1990s, Michael Howard rejected the prevailing consensus that it was impossible to reduce crime rates. He introduced much tougher policies, and presided over the start of the largest peacetime fall in crime in history. Immigration is not like crime, but the two have one thing in common: the only result of accepting that high rates are inevitable is that those rates go up. I don't know whether or not Mrs May is going to be able to cut immigration to less than 100,000 a year. But I do know that her determination to achieve that result gives her the only possible chance of success.