The immigration figures tell a story of elite failure

Remember when we were told that Brexit would lead to a draw-bridge Britain, closed to migrants forever more? That particular Remainer scare story is now, officially, defunct.

This week, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed that 728,000 more people came to live in the UK than had left in the year to June 2024. That’s three to four times the net migration the UK averaged annually during the 2010s. To put that into context, nearly the same number of people arrived in the UK in a single year as live in the entire county of Suffolk.

Even more striking than this year’s net-migration figure was the ONS’s decision to revise the 2022-23 figure upwards, from an already record-breaking 740,000 to a new high of 906,000. This means that between June 2022 and June 2024 over 1.6million more people migrated to the UK than emigrated. This migratory wave is historically unprecedented, and stands in stark contrast to the then Tory government’s pledge to reduce immigration.

It should be said that there are good reasons why net migration has been so high in recent years. Over 500,000 refugees arrived in the UK on a long-term basis, fleeing war in Ukraine, CCP authoritarianism in Hong Kong and the brutally repressive Taliban in Afghanistan, thanks to special government schemes. The ONS attributes its undercount for 2022-23 partially to its underestimation of the number of Ukraine visas granted.

Those who wilfully ignore these one-off geopolitical factors do the debate no favours. There was widespread support for those re-settlement schemes and there continues to be. Because, contrary to the Guardianista caricature, Brits are not heartless xenophobes. Quite the opposite.

But those refugee schemes do not explain the similarly sky-high numbers more recently. Not only did the last Tory government vastly increase legal migration while promising the opposite – a democratic outrage whatever position on migration you might hold – it also did so for reasons that are far from positive.

The British state has effectively been using mass immigration as a palliative for a deep-seated economic malaise – a sticking plaster for profound structural problems, from poor productivity to chronic worklessness. Instead of seeking to transform Brexit Britain’s economy, to raise wages and get people back into gainful employment, the state has allowed businesses to bring in labour from abroad, on an unprecedented scale, to plug the gaps in a stuttering, low-wage economy.

This had been happening on a smaller scale in the 2000s and 2010s, as EU free movement gave both the private and public sectors access to much cheaper foreign-born labour. But rather than shaking this habit after Britain left the EU – by paying better wages to those already living here and seeking to raise productivity – the state’s and businesses’ use of migrant labour has turned into a full-on addiction.

As one economist notes in the Guardian, all labour-force growth over the past five years has come from migration. This point was rammed home by the ONS in June, when it revealed that, for the first time ever, 20 per cent of the UK workforce – or nearly seven million workers – is foreign-born.

You can be in favour of a liberal migration policy, as we at spiked are, and realise that opening the doors purely due to an addiction to cheap labour will only prolong our economic problems, and turn people against migration to boot.

Indeed, it would be wonderful if all these new arrivals had come to join a dynamic Britain, to help us create and build up the country. But that’s not what has been happening. The British government has been dishing out millions of migrant work visas not to help us forge a better future together, but to mask internal problems to which the state seems incapable of finding solutions.

A big part of the reason for the recent surge in the migrant labour force has been the surge in worklessness among working-age Brits since the pandemic. This has taken the number of those signed off as ‘long-term sick’ from just over two million before the lockdowns to over 2.8million today. The vast majority of that increase is attributable to a rise in people reporting mental-health problems – problems, it seems, that do not seem to afflict the migrant workforce. In total, there are now nearly six million people on some form of out-of-work benefits.

This is a social – as well as economic – catastrophe. Vast swathes of the citizenry are being put out to pasture, deprived of the dignity and autonomy that work brings. Unable to tackle worklessness in a society suffering from a chronic worker shortage (job vacancies have hovered around one million since 2020), the government has tried to cover it up through migration.

We see the grim side-effects of this palliative all around us. Migrants now fill many shamefully low-paid roles, especially in the care sector, while ever-growing numbers of working-age Brits subsist on state support. The economy continues to stagnate, with businesses preferring cheap labour to productive investment. Meanwhile, whole communities wither on the vine.

This is all exacerbated by our dilapidated infrastructure. Unprecedented numbers of migrants are arriving at a time when housing, the health service and our transport infrastructure have been allowed to degrade, for decades, by an inert British state. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that inviting ever more people to use increasingly sparse resources is going to cause discontent.

Worse still, this has happened at a time when our political and cultural elites are gripped by various forms of national self-loathing, and champion a state multiculturalism which promotes separatism over integration. This all has the effect not of welcoming newcomers into British national life, but of all but encouraging a soft segregation.

Britain has done better than many other nations on integration in spite of these policies. Indeed, Brits of migrant background tend to be more patriotic than the average. But there are still significant pockets of ghettoisation, and the combination of multiculturalism and this new influx seems likely to create more.

We’ve ended up with a migration policy that doesn’t have a shred of democratic legitimacy, that is being embraced for entirely negative reasons, all while integration remains a dirty word. This isn’t a Britain, confident in its values, welcoming migrants to join and build up the nation – with the infrastructure to accommodate them and the desire to integrate them. This is something very different – migration as a form of economic can-kicking; to keep a creaking, low-pay economy just about ticking over.

If you wanted a migration policy designed to sour voters on migration for decades to come, this would be it. We’ve ended up with a settlement that no one voted for, and that no one can possibly defend. The longer it goes on like this, the more needless enmity will be sown.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.