FIGURES published last Thursday showing that both net immigration and asylum claims are falling ‘are being used by Sir Keir Starmer to prove he’s turning things around and delivering for Britain’, the Telegraph reported.
People are not so easily taken in, however. The net migration figure of 171,000 last year – trumpeted as the lowest since 2012, and down from nearly a million in the year to 2023 – is created by taking away the number of people who left Great Britain from those who arrived. The figure that is not trumpeted is the roughly 246,000 British nationals who leave the UK each year to live abroad, of whom the latest stats show only about 110,000 return to the UK annually. This widening gap results in a net loss of more than 130,000 British a year and confirms that many are establishing lives overseas rather than coming back. Increasingly it is white, young and skilled Britons who are fleeing, as we reported at the beginning of the year. For the 12 months ending June 2025, 693,000 people left Britain, an increase of 40 per cent on 2022. Of those leaving, 230,000 were British nationals under 45 years of age.
Coming the other way, last year saw 800,000 people arriving, which with asylum seekers came to a staggering million in total, a figure that remains way, way beyond what most voters, never mind committed Reform, Restore and Advance UK voters, want. Further breakdown of the combined figures suggests that more than a third of our net migrants (assuming most are granted leave to remain) come via asylum claims, many of them arriving in small boats. Often they are economic migrants – young men – who are gaming the system and by definition have a lesser respect for the law.
These figures, as Migration Watch pointed out in an email a day later, still mask the true extent of the problem.
Between 2019 and 2024 (the so-called ‘Boriswave’ of arrivals under the last Conservative government), a net 2,950,000 people immigrated to the UK – the equivalent of two and a half Birminghams arriving in just five years. Even at a reduced rate of 171,000 a year, that is still a city the size of Oxford being added to the population every 12 months: people who need homes, school places, GP appointments, and seats on buses. ‘The tap has been turned down,’ said Migration Watch. ‘It has not been turned off, and the bathtub is already overflowing.’
Migration Watch has been trying to get this message across to the deaf ears in Government and Parliament for years. The response too often has been that immigration is not a top concern of the public. The results of a poll on the public’s attitudes to the scale of immigration and its impact, published by Migration Watch last week, tell a different story. They reveal a high level of concern.
Of a nationally representative sample of 1,520 adults, 61 per cent said net migration between 2019 and 2024 had been too high, 38 per cent saying ‘far too high’ (this being the single largest response category). Only 8 per cent said it was too low. No demographic group – not graduates, not Labour voters, not a single region of the United Kingdom – produced a majority saying levels were too low.
On the question of long-term demographic change, the findings were even more striking. Forty-nine per cent of respondents viewed the projection that the White British population would fall below half of the total by the 2060s negatively, with 33 per cent regarding this as ‘very negative’, the highest single-response intensity recorded anywhere in the poll. That figure exceeded concern about housing availability, crime and the NHS. Politicians and MSM commentators from the centre left as well as the left tell us the public are relaxed about demographic change and that it is a fringe concern. Far from it. As Migration Watch chairman Alp Mehmet pointed out, ‘it is the most deeply held concern in the entire survey’.
The Migration Watch email continues:
‘Yet Westminster continues to treat demographic transformation as a fait accompli, a process to be managed rather than a trajectory to be changed. The current Government, like its predecessor, offers modest visa adjustments while presiding over population growth and demographic change on a scale that no post-war electorate ever voted for. The pace of change may have slowed for the time being but it has not been altered, let alone reversed. And the government simply has no appetite for doing so.
‘The poll makes clear that the public can see and feel the pressure on housing, on public services, and on the character of their communities. They want net migration not merely reduced but brought to genuinely sustainable levels. Politicians must listen, and make the necessary action, or the gap between governing and governed will only grow wider.’
It ends on the consequences:
‘The ONS’s own national population projections, published earlier this year, show the UK population heading towards 74million by the mid-2030s, driven overwhelmingly by migration. The longer-term picture is starker still. Professor Emeritus of Demography at Oxford University, Professor David Coleman, projects that the White British share of the population will fall below 50 per cent by the early 2060s. Indeed, he has been saying this for over 15 years. Other academics have more recently come to similar conclusions. We are facing a transformation in the demographic character of our country within half a lifetime, driven almost entirely by sustained high immigration, which no one ever voted for. The British people are being betrayed.’
You can read the full survey here.
