The ONS has delivered a bit of a surprise with the upwardly revised figures for UK immigration last year now put at an incredible 906,000. Total arrivals were around 1.2 million and after considering those leaving the UK we get down to the net figure of 906k. Personally, I have no objection to immigration but, ironically, this was said to be the single biggest reason voters in 2016 opted for Brexit - to ‘control our borders’. This was when net immigration was under 300,000 and these were mainly Europeans, many who had moved here temporarily. Since 2019 there has been a staggering increase.
This ONS chart shows what's been happening to gross immigration:
The spike is wholly due to the Home Office issuing visas, so we do actually 'control' who comes and, to some extent, where they come. What we don’t control, is who leaves and the ONS say about 82,000 more people came than they had previously estimated while 84,000 fewer people left. I assume the reduction in those leaving is due partly to losing the ability to easily move to the EU as we could pre-Brexit.
It’s obvious that Europeans don’t want to come to the UK to work as before. The number of EU citizens coming here is down by four-fifths compared to 2016. But employers still need staff and visas are now issued to immigrants from Africa and Asia who meet the criteria. Britain is a less welcoming place after Brexit.
Jonathan Portes, a Professor of Economics and Public Policy at King's College London, writes in The Guardian about Badenoch’s admission that the Tories got it wrong on immigration and her announcement that she would place a strict cap on the number of visas issued if she was ever returned to power.
Portes worked in the Cabinet Office in 2010 and tried to warn Cameron that making pledges about immigration figures “would almost certainly present him with the unpalatable choice between deliberately damaging the UK economy and labour market, and conspicuously failing to deliver a high-profile political commitment.”
Cameron didn’t accept the advice and chose the latter option. He was forced to keep apologising for the numbers year after year, which looking back now seem almost modest. Badenoch has confirmed she would do the opposite, deliberately damaging the economy and labour market to avoid having to apologise for the immigration statistics.
Portes says elsewhere that the increase in the number of people in employment in the UK since 2019 is almost totally due to immigration. The economy has struggled since Brexit and has mostly flatlined in recent years. Imagine what would have happened if the Tories had actually succeeded in getting immigration back to the tens of thousands that Cameron kept promising, or Badenoch had been PM.
Freedom of movement gave British employers ready access to the EU labour market, allowing them to recruit easily and cheaply when needed. Workers from Europe could easily return home if the jobs weren’t available. It was the perfect system. We now have workers from far-flung places who are much more likely to bring dependents and stay in the UK forever.
Also, I assume as the world grows more uncertain, people are less likely to want to leave these shores and having ended freedom of movement we have blocked the way for British people to freely move into Europe.
However, I am less convinced that Brexit is the sole cause of the problem, the pandemic is also to blame. There are a lot of cases of long-term covid which have upset the UK labour market. It’s quite conceivable that even without Brexit, the number of migrants would have increased substantially and Farage and Co would have created a stink about that.
What I think we can safely say, is that the whole idea of ‘controlling’ immigration through civil servants in Whitehall issuing visas is not working and probably can’t work. It's also cumbersome, costly, and slow. Brexit, far from solving anything has simply added to our problems. Falling trade, reduced GDP and tax revenues, more difficulty traveling, more red tape, etc, etc. The experiment has failed.
It also puts into perspective the totally irrational focus on a few boat people arriving each year. The amount of money spent on that is massively out of proportion to the problem.
The ONS figures show the numbers are now beginning to come down. Portes notes that the number of visas issued in the latest quarter was down a third on the previous year, with a particularly large fall in the number of health and care visas, down by more than 80%.
Remember this is all legal migration. A man who works for The Refugee Council posted some figures to show how the Home Office under Yvette Cooper is getting to grips with asylum seekers arriving in the UK:
This is what the increase in decisions and interviews following the election looks like. The drop off in May, June and July was because the Illegal Migration Act had prevented officials from processing any claims. The new government undid that, getting the system going again.— Jon Featonby (@jonfeatonby.bsky.social) 28 November 2024 at 10:45
I think it shows there are no easy fixes to any of this and Kemi Badenoch is wrong to suggest that there is. Like a lot of complex problems, it takes time, patience, money, a bit of compassion, and the slow grind of putting in place the systems and infrastructure to cope.
Had this been recognised ten years ago we might have avoided Brexit and everything that has come with it.
