Is UK immigration out of control?
No it’s not out of control, nor is it increasing.
There’s been a lot of noise lately about immigration being “out of control.” Social media is full of it. So are the usual suspects—the Mail, Telegraph, and certain politicians who never miss a chance to shout fire in a crowded theatre.
But here’s the truth: immigration isn’t spiralling out of control. It’s falling. Fast.
According to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics, net migration into the UK has just seen the largest drop on record. That’s right—record-breaking. You wouldn’t know it from the headlines, but the numbers speak for themselves.
If you’re sceptical (and frankly, more people should be), read the ONS report here:
This is a big win for the Government—whether by design or luck. I strongly suspect that Keir Starmer knew these numbers were coming when he made that recent speech on immigration.
This takes me back to three rules of politics I learned during my House of Commons induction nearly 20 years ago, courtesy of Baronesses Cumberledge and Cumberbatch:
- Keep in with the outs.
- Exploit the inevitable.
- Don’t stand between a dog and a lamp post.
Starmer is doing all three. After the last Conservative Government presided over a sharp rise in immigration, a fall was almost inevitable. Some of the key drivers of the decline are external:
- The end of the Syrian civil war
- Fewer arrivals from Ukraine
- The closing of the Hong Kong settlement scheme
Even if the Government had done nothing, net migration would likely have dropped. Now they’re layering in new policies that will push the numbers down further—even with the reintroduction of the EU’s youth mobility scheme.
But let’s be honest about when immigration really did spiral out of control:
According to the House of Commons Library, immigration truly surged in the post-Brexit years, not before. Pre-Brexit, the UK competed with Germany and France for workers. Post-Brexit, we’re in a different league—competing with Albania and Turkey. That’s a race to the bottom, and the only way to “win” it is to pay people less.
The collapse in UK living standards isn’t a bug. It’s a feature of Brexit economics. It’s how Britain becomes “competitive” outside the EU.
Devaluation helped too. After the Brexit vote, the pound fell hard—dropping from €1.43 in November 2015 to below €1.20 in mid-2016, and reaching a low of €1.11 by October 2020. Still, it wasn’t enough. So the outgoing Conservative Government turned to mass immigration—not from the EU, but from lower-wage countries. Many of these new arrivals worked for less than the UK’s minimum wage, deliberately undercutting the labour market to keep costs down.
And now Reform UK wants to do… what, exactly?
There’s been a lot of breathless coverage of Reform UK’s economic strategy, and rightly so. They’ve already made more than double the unfunded spending promises Liz Truss made. But the real black hole isn’t in the fiscal arithmetic—it’s in the logic of their immigration and wage policy.
If Reform UK wants to stop immigration while doubling down on hard Brexit, there’s no magic fix. Someone has to work those low-wage jobs. And if it’s not migrants, it’s going to be you. Or your kids. Or your neighbours.
Some voters might relish the idea of dragging people back into hard, low-paid work—“teach them the value of a hard day’s labour,” “put people back in their place,” and all that. But what they don’t seem to realise is:
They are the ones who’ll be doing those jobs for less money.
That’s the real cost of Brexit, and the real hole in Reform UK’s economic plan.
I wonder if Reform’s (unspoken) plan to fix the British economy is simply to euthanize the care home residents?