First of all, some stats from the blog for 2012:

• 722,000 page views
• 2,000 page views per day on average
• 356,000 visitors
• 2 min 46 sec average visit duration
• 2 pages viewed per visit on average
• 149 new blog posts in 2012 (three per week)
• 21,500 unique visitors per month
• 33,608 clicks to BAILII in 2012 alone
• 1,560 email subscribers by year end
• 1,770 Twitter followers by year end

Most popular posts of 2012:

• New statement of intent on family migration
• Zambrano case
• New rules on long residence
• European Commission warns UK
• Amendment to EEA regulations

Elsewhere, there have been nine Statements of Changes to the Immigration Rules this year, which is a number unprecedented since the advent of modern immigration controls in 1972. The biggest substantive changes have surely been the introduction of the new family migration rules, which are having an awful effect on those in a relationship with a foreigner but on low to average income. The wholesale incorporation of the Points Based System into the main Immigration Rules was also a major development: the resulting absurd complexity and unintended consequences perhaps finally showed that the basic system of immigration law and control introduced by the 1971 Act is broken and beyond repair.

The UK Border Agency continued to be heavily criticised by all and sundry its own Inspectorate and Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee in several coruscating reports this year. Nevertheless, there are no real signs of improvement, and yet the courts continued to show huge deference to elsewhere discredited executive discretion. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the field of immigration detention. Appallingly long periods of detention have been found lawful in several higher court cases this last year.

Looking ahead, the Home Office seems to have finished with its major reforms to the immigration system and 2013 is likely to see tinkering with the detail and perhaps even some liberalisation where Government realises it has gone too far or where particularly powerful lobby groups such as the university and international business sectors manage to get their voices heard, if not by the deaf ears of the Home Office then by other ministers in other departments. Appeal rights will likely be further curtailed and immigration judicial reviews transferred to the Upper Tribunal. Legal Aid is to be effectively ended for immigration cases with 98% of cases coming out of scope according to Legal Services Commission projections.

More broadly, the remaining immigration lawyers will no doubt continue to plough our lonely, unloved and unfashionable farrow on the bleeding edge of human rights law while others look on with disdain, failing to appreciate that what we as a society do to an immigrant we do to a real human being no different to the rest of us. As the late Soloman Burke sang, “None of us are free, one of us are chained.”