Where the Tories failed on controlling Britain’s borders, letting net migration surge to an unprecedented 944,000 in the year to March 2023, Labour has succeeded. It shows what can be achieved through hard work and strict adherence to human rights laws rather than heartless gimmicks like the Rwanda scheme.
That, at any rate, is what the government will want us to believe when the latest net migration figures are published this week. They are almost certain to show that they have fallen to less than 200,000, and possibly as low as 160,000. If the latter, it would be the lowest figure for 14 years, outside Covid. Some Labour MPs are planning to use the figures to call for the government’s migration reforms to be abandoned on the grounds they are not necessary. Everything is under control.
Labour dumped the one policy which did appear to be making a difference: the Rwanda scheme
Except that it isn’t, and it will be outrageous for the government to try to take credit. This is partly because reforms introduced under Rishi Sunak have a lot to do with the fall in net migration. In its final manifestation, the last Conservative government raised the qualifying salary threshold for a work visa and banned students and care workers from bringing dependants with them.
The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has proposed to go further and double the qualifying period that foreign nationals must live in Britain before being eligible for indefinite leave to remain. But those changes – if not squashed by Labour backbenchers or a new Labour leader – will not influence the migration figures for a couple of years at the earliest.
Secondly, immigration has not fallen by as much as the net migration figures might suggest. This is because there has been a strong rise on the other side of the ledger – people leaving the country. In the year to June 2025 nearly 700,000 people emigrated. Not all of this can be put down to people fleeing from Rachel Reeves’s high-tax, anti-enterprise fiscal policies – a lot of it was down to record numbers of overseas students reaching the end of their courses and returning home – but at least some of it can be. A third of those who left in the year to June 2025 were UK citizens. It is a bit rich for Labour to be boasting about controlling Britain’s borders when part of the story is its failed economic policies.
Finally, the decline in immigration is almost entirely down to a fall in legal migration. Meanwhile, illegal migration continues to run out of control. Last year, 41,472 irregular migrants arrived on small boat crossings, second only to 2022. This is the real problem: people misusing the asylum system in order to gain entry to Britain, in many cases in order to commit crimes. In all cases illegal migrants are a drain on the UK taxpayer because they are fed and accommodated at public expense while being forbidden from supporting themselves through work.
Labour dumped the one policy which did appear to be making a difference: the Rwanda scheme. In spite of promises to target the people-smugglers, there are few tangible achievements which have sprung from it. The ‘one in, one out’ deal with France has been a farce which has done little to act as a deterrent.
Reducing net migration is nothing to cheer about when it has been achieved by stopping nurses coming to take up jobs in the NHS while criminals continue to exploit human rights laws in order to step around the system. Labour MPs are kidding themselves if they think the government has really won the battle to control our borders.
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