Number crunch: why Britons ignore immigrant drop

Immigration to Britain has gone through the most extraordinary boom and bust cycle.

Joel Budd is our social affairs editor.

After the COVID pandemic, when Britain started to allow people to move freely into the country, the number of immigrants rose very, very dramatically to the sorts of levels that Britain has never seen.

In the year to March twenty twenty-three, more than one and a half million immigrants arrived in the country intending to stay for more than a year or so at least, and many, many fewer left.

So net migration, which is what Britain tends to obsess over, went above nine hundred thousand per year.

So it was as though a city the size of Birmingham had suddenly materialized in the country.

Who were they?

They were a mixture.

Some were Hong Kongers and Ukrainians because the British government had favored people from those countries, recognizing that Hong Kongers were facing oppression and Ukrainians, of course, invasion.

Some were students who were taking advantage of much more liberal rules about working after graduation, but quite a few of them were simply workers.

Britain made it easier to get a work visa.

So why was the British government at that time so welcoming to immigrants?

It's slightly strange because in a sense, it was welcoming to immigrants because it had become unwelcoming to Europeans specifically.

Britain left the EU in twenty twenty, and in early twenty twenty-one, it canceled free movement.

So before then, it had been possible for a French person or a Polish person to simply move to Britain and take whatever job they wanted, and it became impossible.

So the government thought, "Well, hang on a second.

You know, many of our industries have really depended on Europeans," and the famous one was the hospitality industry.

"And we don't want to have nobody coming into the country to do those sorts of jobs in future.

So what we will do is we'll make it easier for everybody to get a work visa." And what happened was very few Europeans took Britain up on that offer.

So, like Polish migration to Britain completely collapsed.

But many people from Asia and Africa did.

The number of work and study visas given to Indians tripled between twenty nineteen and twenty twenty-two.

Indians were the big group.

Nigerians were the second biggest.

So that's the boom of the cycle that you described.