In the spring of 2011, I was at an Oxford college dinner sitting between the two most powerful unelected people in Britain. I said to one of them, Gus O’Donnell, then the most senior civil servant in the land, that I was writing a book about immigration. He replied: “When I was at the Treasury, I argued for the most open door possible to immigration…. I think it’s my job to maximize global welfare, not national welfare.”
I was surprised to hear this from the head of a key national institution and asked the man sitting on my other side, Mark Thompson, then director-general of the BBC (subsequently CEO of The New York Times and now of CNN), whether global welfare should be placed before national welfare if the two should conflict. He agreed that it should.
This exchange helps to explain why immigration to Britain, which has already been too high for most people’s comfort for the past 20 years and contributed to the Brexit vote in 2016, has exploded in the last couple of years under the post-Brexit arrangements that were supposed to reduce it. Net immigration in the year to June 2023 has just been revised up to more than 900,000 (in a country of 68 million)—more than three times the previous high.
The people at the top of Britain’s universities, businesses, government departments, and health service not only have a benign view of mass immigration, they often have a vested interest in high inflows; and living in the expensive parts of town, they are protected from the consequences of their immigration beliefs.
Keir Starmer, the Labour prime minister, has now attempted to put himself on the right side of the immigration explosion by accusing his Tory predecessors of consciously conducting a “one-nation experiment in open borders.” But don’t expect this rhetorical shift to be accompanied by the necessary changes in policy.
A lot of people who voted for Brexit in 2016 and then Boris Johnson’s Tory party in 2019 were traditional Labour voters who had drifted away from the party as it came to be dominated by liberal graduates who embraced mass immigration and felt ambivalent about the nation state.
Johnson promised them “leveling up” (meaning a significant investment in their post-industrial places), an end to EU free movement, and lower overall immigration. He did deliver an end to free movement, but leveling up turned out to be a slogan, and legal immigration took off like a rocket in 2022. This was partly thanks to temporary factors like the Ukraine war and post-Covid pent-up demand, but also to a desire to signal a post-Brexit openness to the world.
Meanwhile, the continuing illegal immigration flow on small boats across the English Channel is not only a daily affront to people’s sense of democratic order, but too often, the incomers are transferred from their boats to the main local hotel in a post-industrial town, a valued local gathering place. One result of this massive political failure was the targeting of these hotels in the anti-immigration rioting that followed the murder of three young girls in Southport last August.
Starmer moved decisively to stop the violence. But he now faces a tougher challenge to prevent further unrest. He and his party have, until now, welcomed high immigration and the resulting demographic transformation of Britain, where the nonwhite British share of the population has risen to almost a third in just two decades, up from around 10 percent. In the great Brexit drama, he also actively opposed the ending of free movement from the European Union.
But immigration was so high in 2022 and 2023 that it was easy for Starmer to argue during Labour’s victorious election campaign this summer that it should be substantially reduced and to frame this as a pro-worker, anti-laissez-faire measure, thereby appealing to former Labour voters without alienating the party’s left-liberal base.
Moving forward, things won’t be so easy. The outgoing Conservative government realized too late that its liberalization measures had opened the floodgates, prompting the Tories to change some of the rules. They made it harder for people on work and student visas to bring in dependents and raised the salary threshold for work visas.
These measures are bringing the inflow down, but not fast enough to satisfy the public, and they are doing nothing to stop the boats, especially as one of Labour’s first acts in office was to scrap plans to process asylum seekers outside the UK in Rwanda (a version of which is now increasingly popular across Europe).
“Around 80 percent are people coming in on student or work visas.”
Nearly 90 percent of current legal migration inflows come from outside the European Union—mainly from India, Nigeria, Pakistan, China, and Zimbabwe—and very little of it is the high-skill, economy-boosting, migration that had been promised. Around 80 percent are people coming in on student or work visas, but nearly half of those were their accompanying dependents in 2023. The proportion coming in who are actually workers was below 20 percent last year, and most of them were coming to work in the National Health Service or the struggling social-care system.
Starmer has promised a white paper on immigration reduction. Some on the Blue Labour wing of the party, possibly including Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, see this immigration challenge as a means to shift the party in a new, more culturally conservative direction.
But if Labour is serious about returning net migration swiftly to more acceptable levels of, say, around 200,000 a year, it will have to take measures that will be unpopular with some of its core supporters, especially in a university sector heavily dependent on international students.
These measures would include: abolishing or severely restricting the current two-year post-study work opportunity for holders of student visas; requiring employers to train a UK worker for every work visa they are granted; increasing the earnings threshold for those wanting to bring in family members (something the last government proposed and Labour has so far refused to implement); lengthening the qualifying period for permanent residence to 10 years, up from five; beefing up immigration enforcement; and instead of levying small fines on the many employers who employ illegal migrants, sending them to prison.
In the longer term, the NHS and social-care system need to gradually phase out their dependence on immigrants. Britain also needs far better controls on who is in the country, which means checking peoples’ travel documents out of the country, as well as in, and introducing some form of digital ID card system.
And illegal flows need to be stopped entirely, either by persuading France that it is also in its interests to accept an automatic return of Channel boats, or by significantly ramping up deportations including to countries like Iran or Eritrea where asylum seekers safety can’t be guaranteed.
The chances of much of the above being implemented remains small from a combination of state incapacity, political squeamishness, and the higher public spending that would be needed as a result of fewer international students and health-care migrants.
There will be lots of tough talk from Starmer on immigration in the weeks ahead, and he will probably even mean some of it. But without painful cuts to visas for students and health workers—cuts that could provoke serious unrest within Labour ranks—numbers will stay stubbornly high.
Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, possibly boosted with some of Elon Musk’s cash, will be fighting it out with a renascent Conservative Party under Kemi Badenoch, to see who can most effectively expose what is likely to be the yawning gap between Starmer’s words and the realities of immigration in Britain.