Ahead of the leaders' debates - which start tonight with the Milliband/Cameron "head to head" - we've been looking at some of the available facts and figures on some of the issues likely to feature. 

Here's what we discovered about immigration in Dorset: 

Bournemouth has the highest proportion of non-UK residents.  

At 14.9 per cent, the town has the largest percentage of migrants by some way. Poole comes second with just over 8%. East Dorset is lowest, at 4.9% followed by Purbeck and West Dorset at 5.4%, with Christchurch only slightly higher, at 5.7%. 

Bournemouth's migrant population has more than doubled in the last ten years.

An estimated 31,000 non-UK residents now live in Bournemouth, compared with 13,150 at the time of the 2001 census. Poole has the next highest increase (68.7%) from 7,161 to 13,600. Christchurch comes third, at 34.2% but in numerical terms that represents a much smaller increase, from 2,015 to 3,000.

There are twice as many Irish migrants than Polish migrants in Christchurch

The ONS doesn't release country of origin information about all non-UK migrants - instead it gives percentages for the five most populous groups in each region. For the South West, that's Poland, Ireland, Germany, the US and India. In the South East, the US is replaced by South Africa, giving us the interesting fact that there more South Africans than Poles in the New Forest.

The biggest single group in Christchurch are the Irish, followed closely by Germans. In Purbeck, 21.75% of migrants are German - the biggest group by some way. Bournemouth and Poole both have more Polish migrants that any other specified group.

Dorset and the New Forest is estimated to have taken 1.43% of those who have come to the UK since the 2011 census.

The data for the 2014 figures are limited. The Labour Force Survey says that 565,000 people have come to work in the UK since 2011. However, official data does not record where those people end up.

We're using the Migration Observatory's data - part of Oxford University’s Centre on Migration Policy and Society  - which extrapolates from the Labour Force Survey data of 2011 and 2014 to estimate how many migrants are in each local authority now, as compared with the census in 2011. You can read more about their project and the limitations of their method here.

The 2014 figures say that there are now 81,500 migrants in Dorset and the New Forest - that's up 8,104 - 9.9% - on 2011. That's 1.43% of the total migrants who've entered the UK in that time.

There's more non-EU migration than you might think

Given the way UKIP has dominated the media agenda, you'd be forgiven for thinking that EU migration was a much larger proportion of the population than it is. But the figures actually show that in almost all our areas, non-Eu migrants make up more than half.

 

Note: edited to add figures for East Dorset