For all the headlines, political rows and television footage, you could be forgiven for thinking that Britain’s immigration problem begins and ends with small boats. It does not.
No one is denying the Channel crisis is serious; we at Migration Watch have tracked it from the very start. Last year, 41,472 people arrived in Britain by small boat. That was down on the previous year, but remains at historically high levels. And on Wednesday this week alone, a staggering 781 small boat migrants were caught crossing the Channel – enough to fill two Boeing 747 jumbo jets.
While Britain’s border security collapses, it seems there is not a penny spared for the security of new arrivals. A video showing a convoy of police vans escorting empty buses used to transport arriving small boat migrants went viral on social media. How many crimes will go unsolved due to this misallocation of scarce police resources?
Meanwhile, the legal immigration system continues on a vastly larger scale than the boats.
Consider just some of the routes under which visas were being issued during the first quarter of this year: Sponsored Study, Skilled Worker, Health and Care Worker, Global Talent and Seasonal Worker. These are only a selection of the work and study routes contained in the Home Office’s quarterly visa statistics.
Some 33,000 main-applicant student visas alone were issued in the first three months of 2026. The comparatively small Global Talent route issued another 1,455 visas, including dependants, during the same quarter. The Home Office granted 779,000 non-visitor visas in the year ending March 2026. That included 253,000 work visas, including dependants, 410,000 sponsored study visas, and 62,000 family visas. On top of this came millions of visitor visas and more than one million grants extending the stay of people already in Britain.
As if this wasn’t enough, the government is now proposing to add to the migration routes, sneaking them through in parallel with Immigration and Asylum Bill, “as safe and legal routes” for would-be asylum seekers. Our Chairman drew attention to this in his evidence to the Public Bill Committee last week on 15 September – there was a video recording of the session in last week’s newsletter. We were surprised that the Committee seemed unconcerned that these new routes could potentially lead to just about any of the nearly 120 million displaced people (according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees) claiming asylum through sponsorship by employers, NGOs, communities, families or universities. Alp warned that such a loosening of the system could lead to levels of immigration that would dwarf the Boriswave.
Migration Watch’s argument has long been that the debate should not allow the highly visible scandal of the boats to become a distraction for examining the immigration system as a whole. Illegal small boat migration is just one part of the story. Government policy governing the hundreds of thousands of people admitted legally each year is another: and, numerically, a much larger one.
Any serious discussion about immigration control therefore has to look beyond the beaches of Kent and towards the decisions being taken, every day, in the Home Office itself.
