One of the great tragedies of the way immigration policy has been debated in this country for years, if not decades, is that the conversation is mostly voiced in emotive rather than rational terms.
Those who air fears about the flows of foreign-born people into the UK are dismissed as bigots (most famously by Gordon Brown). Those who argue that immigrants are good for the economy are dismissed as being deluded or blind to a mounting crisis.
Politics Hub: Follow the latest from Westminster
So what’s actually going on? Well, let’s take a deep breath, try if we can to ignore all the emotions, and focus instead on the numbers. What do those numbers tell us?
Highest net migration in British history
Well, the big picture is… big. The total flows of migrants coming into the country in recent years have been nothing short of astounding. While the figures have plateaued in the past 18 months or so, as of late 2023, immigration (which is to say, people coming to live here) was running at roughly 1.3 million people a year. Subtract those emigrating in that period (roughly 400,000), and that leaves you with net migration of nearly 900,000 people.
This is such a large number it’s actually quite hard to get your head around it, but here’s one way. As a percentage of the population (it comes out at about 1.25%), this is the highest net migration this country has ever experienced, since roughly comparable records began hundreds of years ago. Indeed, I cannot find another similar episode running back to the reign of Henry VIII.
A recent anti-immigration protest in Bristol. Pic: PA
How did we get here?
It wasn’t all that long ago that David Cameron was promising to reduce net migration to the “tens of thousands” each year. So how did we get to a place where net migration was close to running into seven figures?
In large part, the answer comes back to the…
