One of the great tragedies of the way immigration policy has been debated in this country for years, if not decades, is that the conversation is mostly voiced in emotive rather than rational terms.

Those who air fears about the flows of foreign-born people into the UK are dismissed as bigots (most famously by Gordon Brown). Those who argue that immigrants are good for the economy are dismissed as being deluded or blind to a mounting crisis.

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So what’s actually going on? Well, let’s take a deep breath, try if we can to ignore all the emotions, and focus instead on the numbers. What do those numbers tell us?

Highest net migration in British history

Well, the big picture is… big. The total flows of migrants coming into the country in recent years have been nothing short of astounding. While the figures have plateaued in the past 18 months or so, as of late 2023, immigration (which is to say, people coming to live here) was running at roughly 1.3 million people a year. Subtract those emigrating in that period (roughly 400,000), and that leaves you with net migration of nearly 900,000 people.

This is such a large number it’s actually quite hard to get your head around it, but here’s one way. As a percentage of the population (it comes out at about 1.25%), this is the highest net migration this country has ever experienced, since roughly comparable records began hundreds of years ago. Indeed, I cannot find another similar episode running back to the reign of Henry VIII.

How did we get here?

It wasn’t all that long ago that David Cameron was promising to reduce net migration to the “tens of thousands” each year. So how did we get to a place where net migration was close to running into seven figures?

In large part, the answer comes back to the introduction of the new post-Brexit migration rules implemented under Boris Johnson’s government. Among these reforms were measures making it comparatively easier for non-EU nationals to get visas. There were also, perhaps even more importantly, new student visa rules making it easier to come and study in this country.

Students and government policy

The upshot is that numbers of students from countries around the world (but mostly outside the EU, led by India, China, Nigeria, and Pakistan) flowed into this country. The extent to which these visas were really quasi-working visas, enabling young workers to come into this country to work in the gig economy, is something economists and officials are still picking over even now. But what is clear is that there is nothing normal about this influx.

It’s perhaps worth underlining at this stage that this immigration – the record flows, greater than anything we’ve seen since at least Henry VIII – is nearly all legal. These are people coming into the country not illegally or on small boats or via the asylum system, but having been issued with visas by the Home Office. This was a direct result of government policy (as well as the economic incentives of coming to a country like the UK). But that raises another question: how much of this was small boats?

After all, the vast majority of coverage in papers and television news in recent weeks has fixated on the small boats. So how much of that total do they account for? In short, just under 5% of the total.

None of this is to say small boats aren’t a very big issue for the UK. But, surprising as this might sound, given how many column inches are devoted to them, they are absolutely dwarfed by the legal flows.

High legal migration – but small boats still at record levels

And while the flows of legal immigration to Britain (and, for that matter, student immigration) are among the highest in the developed world, flows of asylum seekers are considerably lower than in most other countries. Britain may rank number one in the OECD on students and number two on overall immigration, but it only saw the eighth-biggest flows of asylum seekers in the most recent year for which we have data (2023).

Of the total flows into the UK in the most recent time period, small boat arrivals accounted for a mere 4.8%. The vast majority is legal migration.

But that being said, the totals coming in on small boats and into the asylum system are nonetheless at unprecedented highs. Moreover, in recent years, asylum seekers have been less likely to be removed from the country. A growing proportion have been bailed, pending their cases, with the upshot that right now the total number of asylum seekers around the UK is close to 125,000 – about the size of Cambridge.

All of which is to say, both of the following statements are true: Firstly, small boats are a tiny fraction of overall immigration, and secondly, Small boat numbers are higher than ever before and are contributing to unprecedented levels of asylum seekers in the UK.

Britain is far from the only country to face these challenges. The question now is whether it can succeed in bringing down the flows and the backlog in the coming years.