Why did Brexit increase immigration | Post war immigration statistics

Suella Braverman is leading a campaign to reduce immigration, furious that former Home Secretary Suella Braverman permitted a massive increase.

Some people think immigration is a good thing, some think it is a bad thing. I am mostly in the good camp.

There is a very obvious reason why the UK has immigration. The UK Birth rate is 1.6. The birthrate we need to stop the population declining is 2.1. Therefore without immigration we would have a shrinking population, and a shrinking labour market; we already have labour and skills shortages in all kinds of areas. In order to keep our population from shrinking we would need immigration equivalent of 0.5% of our population a year, roughly 330,000.

As you can see for most of the post war period net migration was lower than that, although birth rates were higher – they only started to decline from the 60s onwards.

There is a common perception that immigration increased under the last Labour Government, which is pretty much true. In fact immigration was increasing before they came into power, starting with Thatcher in the 80s, and then EU freedom of movement in the early 90s.

The big explosion of net immigration has been since the Brexit vote. A small part of this is Ukrainians coming to the UK, but generally refugees and asylum seekers make up a small part of UK immigration. The peak years for asylum seekers coming to the UK was the late 90s.

Up to 2016 the majority of immigrants came to the UK from the EU. Since 2016 EU immigration has been negative, instead the main source of immigration has been Asia.

Not all Brexit voters voted leave because of immigration. But it is true that immigration was a big part of the Leave campaign, and that “taking back control” of immigration was one of their most powerful arguments.

What has happened since Brexit?

The UK has become even more of a low wage, low investment, low growth economy. The UK Labour market contracted as EU workers left, and more and more workers were unable to work due to sickness. The increase in long term sickness was driven by the Governments failed response to Covid and lack of investment in the NHS.

And that hole in the Labour market has been filled by the largest increase in immigration in the UKs history. It turns out that leaving the EU did nothing to help us control immigration, and actually made the need for immigration greater.

All developed western countries have declining birth rates, and in order to keep their economies growing they will need a combination of immigration and big investment in technology. The UK is in a global competition to attract and retain the best and brightest from around the world, however Brexit and the hostile environment have made the UK much less attractive for highly skilled workers. Instead we have flat economic growth and a massive increase in the number of low paid workers come to the UK.

Probably a lesson to be learned about believing simple slogans

https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN01403/SN01403.pdf