It was easy to miss – just a small, technical change in how we calculate the net migration numbers. But lurking in that change was something profound, something which should keep us up at night. It turned the whole immigration debate upside down.
We all assume people are desperate to come here. But what if that’s changing? What if we’ve made such a pig’s ear of things that we have a different problem: people desperate to get out?
On Tuesday morning, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) updated its assessment of net migration numbers, based on a revised methodology. Until now, the organisation had been producing estimates by asking passengers about their travel plans at airports and ports. Now, it is using tax and benefits records.
The updated figures have had a limited but significant impact on net migration numbers – the key statistic which tells us how many people are leaving the UK, how many are arriving, and the difference between the two. The ONS originally estimated that 431,000 more people arrived in the UK than left in 2024, whereas the new figures revised this down to 345,000.
But the really noteworthy change was not in the headline figure. It was in the underlying data which composed it – specifically, the number of Brits leaving the UK. The ONS initially estimated that just 77,000 Brits had left the country in 2024. In fact, 257,000 had.
This figure dwarfed the number of Britons returning from living abroad, producing a big net outflow. Over the three years leading up to December 2024, 344,000 more Brits had left the country than returned to it.
These are astonishing numbers. Obviously people leave and arrive in a country for all sorts of reasons – romance, jobs, long-held dreams. But generally speaking, successful countries attract people and unsuccessful ones dispel them. The statistics raise disturbing questions about the state of Britain and the wellbeing of the people living in it.
You wouldn’t ever know it from the state of our national debate, of course. We live in a state of denial about how attractive we are, like a middle-aged man with a comb-over perusing an online dating app. Whenever we talk about immigration, we act like living in the UK is the greatest aspiration any human being could entertain. The reality is very different.
Home secretary Shabana Mahmood spent most of this week outlining a grim set of anti-refugee policies. These plans were underpinned by the belief that refugees are desperate to come to Britain as opposed to other countries. The UK, Mahmood said, is a “golden ticket” for asylum seekers.
The only piece of evidence the Home Office provided for this statement was a single isolated statistic from 2024, when asylum claims rose by 18 per cent in the UK while falling by 13 per cent in the EU. It was very carefully chosen to paint a very particular picture. In 2024, the UK actually received around 108,100 asylum applicants. Per capita, we were 17th in Europe, with 16 applications per 10,000 residents. Britain then granted asylum at first decision to around 39,600 people. That makes us 14th in Europe for initial acceptance rates. It adds up to six asylum seekers per 10,000 of the resident population.
This, according to Mahmood’s sinister and misleading rhetoric, is what an asylum system looks like when it is “out of control”. In reality, it barely touches the sides compared to the 250,000 asylum applicants Germany received in 2024, or the 133,700 people it granted refugee status to.
The same is true for immigration generally. Our starting assumption in the immigration debate is that we are being overwhelmed by some great tide of humanity breaking down the front door of the nation. In reality, Britain has a roughly similar foreign-born share of population as other high income countries. More than Italy or Japan, less than Canada or New Zealand – and roughly the same as France or the US.
Our misplaced sense of how attractive we are has led us to adopt an increasingly grim attitude towards immigrants. This was the motivation behind the Brexit vote, when our hysterical anxiety around Polish plumbers led us to detonate our own economy.
In the years after Brexit, countless Europeans left Britain. EU net migration began to fall immediately after the referendum. By 2024, 96,000 more Europeans were leaving Britain than arriving in it. This was a tragedy. We took people who had made Britain their home, who had made Britain a beautiful place to live, and we made it so hostile that they felt they had to leave.
Not content with having alienated Europeans, we now want to do it for the rest of the world. Each time we do so, we make this a less dynamic and successful country.
New immigration restrictions on foreign students, for instance, will suffocate universities, who relied on them for funding because successive governments were too anxious to raise tuition fees. Now that their numbers are set to fall, those universities face financial oblivion. In many cases they are the central economic node for the entire local area, providing employment and demand.
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This is the strange self-fulfilling irony of the immigration story. We persistently fail to grapple with the root causes of our problems and instead blame immigrants for them. Then, our vindictive policies towards those immigrants exacerbate the underlying problems – and the country declines still further.
We may now be reaching a tipping point where our failure is so severe that Brits and immigrants alike have decided this is not a country they want to live in.
We have spent so long fretting about net migration numbers that we did not realise the great unassailable truth that motivates them: You want to be a country with net migration. You want to be somewhere that people want to travel to and stay in. Because the alternative, as we are now discovering, is far, far worse.
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