Pathetic rebuttal of the week

From today's FT:

Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, defended his criticism of the body’s decision to issue unscheduled population statistics last month. The ONS press release, highlighting a 290,000 increase to 6.5m in overseas-born UK residents in the year to June, prompted front-page headlines...

Mr Woolas insisted on Wednesday the data on overseas-born residents could create a misleading impression, citing the fact that the statistic included 370,000 undergraduates and about 300,000 people born to British armed forces personnel serving overseas.

“The fact that one in nine people in this country were born overseas does not tell us anything about immigration,” Mr Woolas stated.

OK, so excluding foreign students (many of whom overstay their visas or were never legitimate students in the first place) and children of armed forces who have served overseas, it's only one-in-ten residents born abroad (ignoring a margin of error of several hundred thousand), what's the big difference?