The government has been in a celebratory mood since the release of the latest immigration figures. The Home Secretary tweeted that the latest ONS figures show that ‘net migration is down 82 per cent’, to 171,000 people a year, and ‘asylum hotel use is down 36 per cent since last year’. But these headline statistics hide bleak truths, and in reality the picture is dire for Labour and for the country.
High net migration is not the problem – it is merely a symptom of the rapid and destructive pace of population transformation
In truth, ‘net migration’ is a misleading measurement, because it is produced by subtracting departures from arrivals. The ONS estimates that 813,000 people immigrated to the UK last year, with 627,000 (77 per cent) of them arriving from non-EU countries. These included 138,000 Indians, 56,000 Pakistanis, 54,000 Chinese and 47,000 Nigerians. Meanwhile, 642,000 left the UK – including a quarter of million British nationals and 118,000 EU nationals. This represents substantial population change – almost 400,000 Brits and Europeans left this country last year, to be replaced by 627,000 migrants from some of the poorest countries in the world. This matters because all populations are not equal.
Denmark collects some of the best statistics on migrant criminality and economic activity. Their data broadly tells us that migrants from the Anglosphere and Western Europe are more economically productive and less likely to commit crimes, while those from places like the Horn of Africa, the Middle East and Pakistan are relatively unproductive and more likely to commit crimes. There is no reason to imagine that such groups would be less criminal or more economically productive just because they’ve arrived on the other side of the North Sea. This means that the population churn we are experiencing will likely continue to raise crime while making our economy less productive and place a greater burden on productive taxpaying members of society.
This kind of churn is also harmful because societies, or indeed islands full of strangers who do not share a common history, culture, religion or sometimes even language, tend to be inherently less cohesive, less happy places. This is a conclusion which even the British government reached in its latest ‘Cohesion Strategy’, titled ‘Protecting What Matters’, which describes an integration ‘emergency’, in which migrants live ‘parallel lives’ and trust is ‘fraying’. This should be pretty obvious to anyone who has spent time living or doing business across the world. Human beings are not interchangeable economic units.
High net migration is not the problem – it is merely a symptom of the rapid and destructive pace of population transformation. Between 2021 and 2025, some 5.6 million people moved to the UK. The result, according to the ONS, is that there were 13,115,000 foreigners living in the UK on 30 June 2024, and the population of the whole country was around 69,000,000 in 2025. This would suggest that 19 per cent of the British population was born overseas, and given new arrivals since it may be the case that over a fifth of our neighbours weren’t born here.
This is the other problem for the government and the country. Even if net migration falls to zero, and even if immigration falls further, a huge number of migrants are already here. As Karl Williams of the CPS has pointed out, migration is similar to inflation – politicians ‘like to boast’ about ‘inflation coming down’, even though prices are still rising. Similarly, the UK is still experiencing a total transformation of its population. This is at a slightly slower rate than during the heights of Boriswave lunacy when net migration peaked at almost a million in 2023. But most of those millions of Boriswavers are still here.
People see the change in their cities, towns and increasingly villages. And they aren’t happy. According to Ipsos, 41 per cent of Brits see immigration as the biggest issue facing the country.
When people say they’re worried about migration, they’re not talking about some abstract statistic. They’re talking about their communities transformed. Jobs which should go to young Brits being taken by migrants. Wages suppressed. Family homes converted to HMOs. And crimes committed by men who should not be here. They’re also very aware that British electorates have voted against migration for decades and have been ignored. The British people have had enough. They made that clear in the local elections earlier this month. Labour’s promises to delay Indefinite Leave to Remain will at least stall the Boriswave from settling, but the truth is that the reversal of the Boriswave must take place if politicians want to win back the public’s trust.
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