In 2019–20, Britain issued around 120,000 work visas. By 2023 that had rocketed to over 600,000, the highest total in modern British history, before easing to roughly 400,000 in 2024. Ministers will point to that fall and call it progress. It isn’t. The system still runs at more than double its pre-Brexit rate: skill thresholds were cut to A-level equivalent, salary floors lowered, the Resident Labour Market Test abolished, and employers handed free rein to recruit from anywhere in the world.

Much of the increase runs through a single route. The Health and Care Worker visa, waved through in 2020 as an emergency pandemic measure, has now issued nearly 710,000 grants, more than half of all work visas combined. Nevertheless, the failures and mistakes made regarding the health and care visa apply generally to the work visa. An emergency fix has become the permanent business model for recruiting NHS and care staff, propping up a workforce Britain has spent decades failing to train enough of its own people to fill. The Home Office effectively licences ‘trusted employers’ to recruit, often with the help of local recruitment agencies, unlimited numbers of numbers of workers they claim to need. Such a process is wide open to abuse and often is.

The number that should worry ministers most, as it has the public, is not just how many workers came but also who came with them. In 2023, for the first time on record, dependants outnumbered the workers themselves: roughly 260,000 family members against 225,000 main applicants, a ratio of 1.16 dependants for every worker. A route sold to the public as filling job vacancies, in practice, became a family-settlement channel in all but name.

The countries now supplying these visas have narrowed sharply too. India, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Philippines now dominate, with India alone accounting for over 1.4 million work visas since 2005, including more than 160,000 skilled-worker grants in 2023 alone. That is not diversity. It is concentration risk, leaving British hospitals, care homes and universities exposed to labour-market shocks in a handful of countries thousands of miles away.

Here is the part ministers would rather you didn’t notice. Almost everyone admitted on these routes can apply to settle after five years, so the 2020–2024 “Boriswave” cohorts already guarantee a wave of permanent settlement whatever the government does next. Migration Watch’s central estimate is around 384,000 grants of Indefinite Leave to Remain between 2025 and 2029 from these cohorts alone, potentially exceeding 600,000 in total: a city the size of Glasgow added permanently to the British population within a decade, and the decision has already been made.

This is the trick behind every claim that migration is “coming down”. Visa numbers can fall for a year or two while settlement and citizenship totals keep climbing, because today’s totals are simply yesterday’s decisions catching up. Ministers cannot have it both ways: either they act on the routes still open, or they accept that the promise to bring numbers down was empty.

Our report sets out what actually fixing this would require: firm annual caps on the Skilled Worker and Health and Care routes; real restrictions on dependants, if indeed they should come

at all; a genuine return to higher skill and salary thresholds; and a revived Resident Labour Market Test that forces employers to look at home first. None of this is complicated. What has been missing for twenty years is not the policy. It is the political will to design limits in, rather than promise them after the fact.

The post The Work-Visa Boriswave: How “Control” Became a Settlement Machine first appeared on Migration Watch UK.

The post From Control to Dependence: A Review of the Work Visa System first appeared on Migration Watch UK.

Immigration is one of the most serious failures of public policy in Britain over the past thirty years. Yet, despite the purpose of the Committee hearing being to scrutinise the Immigration and Asylum Bill 2026, some questions at times strayed from examining how the legislation would achieve the Government’s stated objectives of reducing illegal immigration and restoring confidence in the asylum system, and descended into political point-scoring.

When asked what evidence there was of measures that had proved successful in dealing with illegal immigration and reducing the number of asylum applications, Alp offered Australia, Denmark, Italy and the United States as countries that had succeeded in slowing or of almost halting the flow of illegal border crossings, adding little in the Bill came close to emulating the measures adopted by any of these countries. Denmark, for example, had confiscated valuables to help meet the cost of accommodating migrants; failed asylum seekers were held in camps pending removal; and measures had been introduced to prevent parallel societies from developing by limiting the proportion of migrants in any given area. There were also lengthy qualifying periods for indefinite leave to remain (eight years). None of this was in the Bill.

According to some reports, a number of countries, including Greece and Italy, had even turned boats back, while the United States had all but sealed its southern border and pretty much halted illegal border crossings along its border with Mexico.

The Member of Parliament for Glasgow South West, Dr Zubir Ahmed, challenged the reference to the United States by asking whether Alp was advocating a model in which “American citizens are being shot dead in the streets”. Alp was puzzled by Dr Ahmed’s question and its relevance to what had happened along the US–Mexico border, which had the desired effect. A government that demonstrates that unlawful entry will not result in indefinite residence creates a very different incentive from one that repeatedly proves incapable of, or unwilling to, remove those who arrive illegally.

As Alp told the Committee, securing the border is hardly an alien or un-British idea. Practical measures such as detention on arrival, rapid processing and the return of those with no right to remain were standard practice for much of the post-war period.

Between 2018 and June 2026, around 210,000 people were detected arriving by this route – more than the entire strength of the combined British armed forces.

Alp argued the Bill does not address the central incentive behind the boats: the expectation that reaching Britain gives an individual a strong prospect of remaining here for a very long time, whatever the eventual merits of his claim.

Dr Ahmed also suggested that leaving the European Union had reduced Britain’s ability to deal with the problem – this is, frankly, nonsense. Alp said, in practice, returns under the Dublin Treaty were few in number in either direction, often took months to arrange, we often took in more than went in the other direction, and provided little deterrent. Alp pointed to what he saw as the Bill’s biggest flaw: its further opening-up of the border through the proposed “safe and legal routes”. These routes would allow approved organisations, institutions, and employers to sponsor asylum seekers.

Under the Bill, any of the 118 million displaced people worldwide (according to UNHCR) who has a relative in the UK or can secure sponsorship from a university, prospective employer, or community may be eligible to enter through one of these routes. Although there have been vague suggestions that the numbers will be capped, it remains unclear how the cap would be determined, who would set it, or whether there would be separate caps for each route or a single overall limit. Alp warned that we would rue the day this part of the Bill came into force.

He further argued that this loosening of the system could ultimately dwarf the Boriswave, a development against which Migration Watch had repeatedly warned. As with the Boriswave, by the time the Government realises what is happening, it may already be too late. Our Chairman concluded that the Bill represented another missed opportunity. If the Government were serious about ending illegal immigration, he argued, it should have gone further by committing to withdraw from the ECHR and ECAT (the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings), repealing the Human Rights Act, and restoring the requirement for migrants to satisfy an immigration official of their bona fides, as used to be the case.

The Bill should also have stipulated that anyone arriving illegally and without documents be denied the opportunity to apply for asylum and refused entry pending removal. The requirement imposed by the courts for the Home Office to disprove a claimant’s backstory is, he argued, both absurd and dangerous.

The post A Serious Problem Deserves A Serious Debate first appeared on Migration Watch UK.

The Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) has acknowledged that high skilled migration partly reflects failures to improve training, pay, conditions and retention. Salaries are perhaps the biggest issue. In 2023, the MAC estimated that newly arriving migrant nurses earned 18% less than domestic nurses, after controlling for age, gender and region. This is because the NHS starts migrant nurses at the bottom of pay scales irrespective of experience. No wonder a dependence has formed, when employers (i.e the NHS)  can use migrant labour to undercut British-trained staff so heavily! Overseas recruitment allows governments to postpone the investment needed to attract and retain staff here, and should be treated as a policy failure to overcome, rather than justification to continue the failure.

As the saying goes, you get what you pay for. The GMC’s 2019 Fair to Refer? report found immigrant doctors were 250% more likely to be referred for a formal disciplinary process over fitness to practice concerns than their British-trained counterparts. Rather than invite reflection, the GMC attributes this to “unconscious bias and lack of strong support networks for BAME doctors”. Likewise, the annual cost of clinical negligence claims against the NHS tripled between 2006/7 and 2024/5.

Meanwhile, opportunities to train remain scarce. Across UK medicine admissions in 2025, there were 25,925 applicants and 11,765 acceptances. England funded 8,230 undergraduate medical places in 2025/26. Britain should expand opportunities for capable students here, alongside the clinical placements and postgraduate posts needed to complete their training. Our medical services have become increasingly dependent on overseas trained medical staff, often importing them from countries with a far greater need for doctors, nurses, midwives and just about every other medic. This is shameful, not least because it is happening when perfectly able, aspiring health professionals here in Britain are being rejected.

The post The NHS Must Break Its Dependence On Overseas Recruitment first appeared on Migration Watch UK.

There is one awkward problem: after thirty years of mass migration, the basic stats have barely budged.

We at Migration Watch have looked into the figures.

In 1994, there were 10,250,000 people claiming a state pension, and 25,070,000 people aged 16-64 in work (rounded to the nearest ten thousand). Put another way, for every 100 pensioners, there were 245 working-age people paying for those pensions through work.

Thirty years later, in 2024, there were 12,900,000 people claiming a state pension, and 32,130,000 people aged 16-64 in work: or, for every 100 pensioners, 249 working-age people in work.

At this point, migration advocates will argue that this underscores their case. Without the mass migration efforts of the last thirty years, the ratio of pensioners to workers might have been even greater. The issue, of course, is that the problem is still there. Enormous, demographically catastrophic mass migration has been pushed on a country that repeatedly rejected it at the ballot box. The pensions crisis remains unresolved while population growth – driven by migration – continues at a historically unprecedented pace, as young migrants too grow older and become the pensioners of the future.  


Looking to the future, the Office for Budget Responsibility still projects the old-age dependency ratio to rise from 31% in 2023 to around 47% over the next half-century. The reason is obvious. Migrants might be younger when they arrive, but they do not remain young forever. The OBR itself warns supposed fiscal benefits of mass migration will be offset by greater pressures on pensions as those migrants age and retire.

This is the flaw in using immigration as a demographic Ponzi scheme. Each new cohort can briefly offset the growing pensioner dependency ratio, but if migrants remain permanently, they eventually become pensioners themselves. Maintaining the ratio then requires another cohort behind them, and behind that cohort, and so on… until the original population has been almost entirely eclipsed.

Meanwhile, the massive inflow of people from overseas creates its own economic problems. The Migration Advisory Committee notes that rapid population growth can reduce capital per worker unless investment keeps pace, while increasing demand for roads, rail and public buildings. Their summary of OBR modelling found that increasing net migration by 200,000 annually might raise GDP by 1.5%, but GDP per head by just 0.1% if capital adjusts fully — and could reduce GDP per head by 0.4% if it does not. The MAC has also concluded that migration’s wage effects are small overall but can be negative for lower-paid workers. To make matters worse, Britain’s real-world productivity growth has stagnated, and at least £9 billion (likely more) leaves the British economy each year in remittances by migrant workers to their homelands.


Not only is the worker to pensioner ratio essentially unchanged since the 1990s, the migration obsession of successive governments has added dozens of other crises to our economy.

The data clearly show using migration to plug the gap hasn’t worked. Never-ending mass migration is not the answer. Indeed, it exacerbates the problem. We say, if you want to solve the pension conundrum, start by calling a halt to the migration Ponzi scheme, now!

The post Immigration Ponzi Scheme Puts Pensions in Peril first appeared on Migration Watch UK.

Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she? Let’s take a closer look.

The figures published on Thursday show that 85,891 people claimed asylum in Britain in the year to June 2026, a fall of 21% on the previous year. OK, but it remains well above the levels Britain experienced for most of the two decades before 2021, when annual claims generally ranged between 22,000 and 46,000.

Nor has illegal entry become a marginal feature of the asylum system. More than half of asylum seekers in the latest year came by an illegal entry route, with 33,949 – 40 per cent of all asylum seekers – arriving by small boat. Altogether, the Home Office detected 38,086 arrivals by illegal routes in the year to June.

Then there are the hotels. The government is understandably pleased that the number of asylum seekers housed in them has fallen by half, from 32,041 to 16,021. Yet look beyond the headline and the picture is less reassuring. There are still 93,293 people receiving taxpayer-funded asylum support. More the double the number ten years ago of 42,500. As for the fall in hotel accommodation, all that is happening is that asylum seekers are shuffled into even more expensive and less secure social housing and contracted homes.

While today’s arrivals command the headlines, yesterday’s immigration is rapidly becoming permanent. The same statistical release reveals that 199,628 people were granted settlement – the right to remain permanently in Britain – in the year to June. That was up 24% in just twelve months and was the highest annual total since 2011.

This is the part of the immigration debate too often forgotten – migration is a cumulative problem, not an annual problem. A huge number of people entering Britain in one year does not magically become acceptable if half as many enter the following year. It has consequences stretching decades into the future as temporary migration feeds through into settlement, chain migration, citizenship, family formation and population growth.

Bringing numbers down from historically exceptional highs is one thing. Restoring a properly controlled, sustainable immigration system, at levels the country can absorb, is quite another.

Andy Burnham’s government is still failing to get a grip. The unacceptably high migration of the past 25 years continues to filter through into settlement, add massively to the population, radically changing the very nature of our society and creating a huge liability for future generations, potentially in the hundreds of billions of pounds.

The post New Home Office Stats Show Government Still Hasn’t Got A Grip first appeared on Migration Watch UK.

On Wednesday, the Home Secretary – no doubt with a nod of approval from her new boss, Prime Minister Andy Burnham – decided to test the theory that all that was needed for young men from countries with very different societal norms where women and girls are regarded as little more than chattels and subservient to men, whatever the circumstances, was a booklet on how to behave. In the face of a litany of sexual crimes committed by asylum seekers (according to the Centre for Migration Control, Afghans are many times more likely to be convicted of sexual offences than British citizens) the Home Office, rather than securing the borders, is issuing new arrivals with a series of leaflets advising them to avoid raping or assaulting women and children. You can read the full booklet here.

Education Secretary Lucy Powell MP’s defence of the booklet was typically revealing:

“I think it’s pretty straightforward that we should be explaining to people…. the rule of law in this country. People coming from other countries do have different cultures, and we have to be absolutely clear with people of how much we abide by the rule of law in this country, what the rule of law is about, and that if people break those laws, they will be treated very harshly… that’s something that we have to constantly educate lots of people about.”

We are glad Ministers finally accept what most sensible people intuitively understand, that cultures have different norms, that their people are not immediately interchangeable, that integration is a difficult and lengthy process, and that failure to integrate incoming populations poses a clear danger.

But for a moment, let us imagine Ms Powell decided to up sticks and move to Afghanistan. Upon arrival in Kabul, she is presented with a booklet similar to the one her government has published, informing her that men and women are not equal; that consent does not matter; that rape is acceptable; that a woman who is raped will be seen as the guilty party, stigmatised and even punished for allowing herself to be raped. And if she has the misfortune to be assaulted, the law will regard her as the guilty party. Would Ms Powell suddenly see the light, acknowledge the error of her English ways and embrace the cultural and behavioural norms of her new country? Exaggerated, maybe, but that is effectively what our government is expecting of young, fighting-age men from parts of the world like Afghanistan. How naïve.

The same day that Ms Powell appeared on LBC to defend this booklet, two Afghan asylum seekers were convicted of raping a woman as she was stargazing in a public park, one of them holding a knife to her partner’s throat. Two more Afghan migrants appeared in court accused of raping a 14-year-old girl on a train. Earlier in the week, an Eritrean man was convicted of raping a pensioner outside a church. An Italian citizen of Nigerian origin who raped a sleeping woman was allowed to stay in the UK by an immigration tribunal.

Would any of these horrendous crimes have been prevented by handing the perpetrators a booklet asking them to behave like the British? Would the men who committed those crimes have changed their views on women and children because Ms Powell handed them a focus-group-tested booklet?

Looking at this from another perspective, the booklet does also show that the politicians finally accept that the flood of undocumented migrants arriving illegally poses a threat, especially to women and girls. What the government must also now acknowledge is that the open borders – by which, in this case, we mean admitting (mostly) young men without being able to check who they are or what their motives, are, are making Britain less safe. The government must stop treating the British people like fools.  The people this absurd booklet is intended for should never be admitted. If they arrive without passports or any other document that shows who they are and what their nationality is, they should be detained, refused entry and returned whence they came – as Section 24 of the Immigration Act 1971 requires.

One, particularly mealy mouthed extract from the booklet is the following: If you have sex with someone without their consent, this is called rape. Rape is a serious crime in the UK. You could go to prison, lose your support and accommodation, and it will affect your asylum claim.

“Affect your asylum claim”? It should read:

If you have sex with someone without their consent, this is called rape. Rape is a serious crime in the UK. You will go to prison, you will lose your support and accommodation, your asylum claim will be annulled, and you will be removed on the first available flight out of the UK after serving your sentence.

The post The Home Office’s Plan To Stop Asylum Rapes first appeared on Migration Watch UK.

It’s worth putting this in perspective. Those 230 Channel migrants on that single boat are the equivalent of a Boeing 737 packed to the brim with passengers. In comparison, 813,000 people migrated to Britain legally in 2025 alone, with the state’s blessing and signature: or, put another way, over 3500 fully-packed Boeing 373 jets in a single year. The dinghies are a fraction of the story and we have never pretended otherwise. But they are the fraction on which Johnson, Sunak, Starmer and now Burnham have staked their governments on fixing. So why have successive Prime Ministers so comprehensively failed to solve what has become an ever more intractable, costly and dangerous problem?

It’s because we have built a system which continually ratchets up pull factors. 95% of small boat migrants claim asylum, and only 4% are ever removed. This means small boat migrants can remain here for many years, at your expense, and in practice for the rest of their life, to enjoy an expanding range of benefits. This week, we learned ministers are weighing paying above-market rents to place asylum seekers in more expensive areas. It’s no surprise that this so-called “dispersal” of asylum seekers appears, among other things, to correlate with increased sexual violence (a 500% increase in sexual violence in north-east England since 2014, for example). Former Conservative minister Edwina Currie suggests, facetiously, that this clear and present danger to women and children could be averted with state-funded brothels for the new arrivals. Or, to put it another way, add a cherry to the cake of taxpayer funded housing and welfare. Ms Currie may have been joking but don’t be surprised if the smugglers weave her remark into their marketing strategy as a serious proposal.

The gangs have, of course, taken full advantage of the situation by professionalising, with better boats and bigger hulls, built to specification. Larger boats mean ticket prices can be cut while the gangs still make huge profits. The Daily Telegraph reports a Channel crossing went for €600 – roughly £513 – in the aftermath of the attempted invasion of Ceuta, down €200 in a week. Many of these cut-price tickets come with riders such as paths into criminality. Even with discounted rates, Monday’s boat will have grossed some £120,000.

While the gangs make fortunes sending boats off, the French government continues to sign lucrative “agreements” with its British counterpart to stop them, no doubt fully expecting the demand for illicit crossings to continue unabated.

The maths is not complicated. The gangs profit from the crossings, France benefits from the crossings, while the migrants benefit with free housing, support and the near-certainty of remaining once here. Everyone does well out of this transaction except the put-upon British taxpayer who is forced to pay up and shut up.

The post For Boatload, Read Planeload first appeared on Migration Watch UK.

Except it isn’t meaningless. White British is a formal category in the UK census, and, as often as not, you’re invited to ascribe one to yourself when completing most official forms – remember the pandemic and the vaccine queues? You had to answer every question, including declaring your ethnicity. This is how our chairman, Alp Mehmet, responded to Mr Nelson on X: “What does the ONS mean by ‘White British? It also refers to ‘other White’ groups and other ethnic groups including: Asian British, Black, Black British, Black Welsh. All tropes? Prof David Coleman + other demographers have for over 15 yrs pointed to 2065.”

It is why Migration Watch uses the term capitalised, as that is how it is written in the census. And on that official, census-tracked measure, the trend is not in doubt. In 2021, 74.4% of people in England and Wales described themselves as White British, down from 80.5% in 2011 and 87.5% in 2001.

As Alp said, Professor David Coleman, Emeritus Professor of Demography at Oxford University, projects white Britons would fall below half the population around the 2060s. Professor Matt Goodwin similarly projects a crossover point in the 2060s.

Messrs Robinson and Nelson, of course, know all this full well.  Their confusion is purely performative. It is a tidy way to dodge the real issue, that Britain is being transformed by rapid mass immigration faster than at any time in its history, despite government after government promising to address the causes of rapid demographic change.

The demographic change Fraser Nelson alludes to, far from being a trope, is not only real but threatens the future stability and economic wellbeing of our country.  Rapid transformation on the scale we are now experiencing strains public services, housing affordability and, above all, the cohesion engendered by a common history, a shared heritage and values inculcated in us by families and communities over generations.

There are those who say,  White Brits becoming a minority will have no effect on our country or that we shouldn’t care either way. Others say not to worry, diversity is our strength. Remember this by Anthony Browne in the Guardian some 25 years ago:

“Jasper felt the process would strengthen Britain. ‘Diversity strengthens a country. It makes it more exciting. We have hundreds of languages spoken, when we go out to eat we never eat English, we eat Thai or French or Indian. It makes London a very cool place to live and work.’”

You may recall Migration Watch commissioned polling into what the public actually thinks about all this. The findings were not surprising – half of the population consider White Brits becoming a minority to be a very negative development for Britain.

So the pretence collapses on contact with the public. Ordinary people do not find “White British” baffling – they know exactly what it means. For some reason, it is only in the radio studio or the editor’s office that a plain census term becomes a riddle. Britain deserves better than a debate in which words in the title of the debate are off limits. This is both absurd and senseless.  

The post What Do We Mean By The White British? first appeared on Migration Watch UK.

An analysis of the Office for National Statistics’ estimates of population change, year-ending June 2025.

The Office for National Statistics estimates that the population of England and Wales reached 62,009,993 by mid‑2025, an increase of 224,874 on the previous year. That is growth of about 0.36%.

Migration continues to be nearly the whole of population growth

Of the 224,874 additional residents, net international migration contributed 211,691. Natural change (births minus deaths) added just 19,624. Net internal migration to the rest of the United Kingdom removed 5,940, and statistical adjustments a further 501. Net international migration therefore accounts for 94% of total population change.

England’s figures, as the most populous-nation, are where this national trend is most visible. Its population reached 58,834,812, up 227,642, of which net international migration supplied 210,034 (92%). Natural change contributed 28,792, and England lost 10,816 people on net to the rest of the United Kingdom.

Had net international migration been zero, England and Wales would have grown by roughly 13,000 people — a rate of about 0.02%. Everything above that line is migration.

This is not a one‑year anomaly. It reflects a structural change in British demography: the natural surplus that drove population growth for most of the post‑war period has effectively disappeared. Births now barely exceed deaths nationally, and in most regions they no longer do. Whatever the merits of any particular immigration policy, the arithmetic is now unambiguous: the size of the population is determined by decisions about visas rather than by demographic momentum.

What follows, and the implications

Three conclusions follow from these figures.

1. First, population growth in England and Wales is now a direct function of immigration policy. The relationship between net migration and population change is close to one‑to‑one, which means that any target for population size or growth is, in practice, a visa policy question rather than a demographic forecast.
   
2. Second, infrastructure planning based on net population change at local level will systematically misjudge demand. Birmingham lost 5,960 residents while receiving 26,920 arrivals. Housing need, school places and health provision in that authority cannot be inferred from the first number. Local authorities should be planning against gross flows, and the arrivals and departures data now published at regional level should be extended to districts so that they can.
   
3. Third, the redistribution effect deserves explicit attention. Growth in the shires and on the coast is largely composed of people leaving the cities that are receiving the largest international inflows. Whether that movement reflects housing costs, school preference, congestion or something else is not answerable from these statistics; but its scale, at 131,961 net departures from London alone, makes it one of the most significant demographic movements currently underway in Britain, and one that receives a small fraction of the attention given to the net migration headline.

The scale behind the net figure

Net figures materially understate the volume of movement. 816,535 people arrived in England and Wales from abroad during the year and 604,844 left: 1.42 million border crossings, equivalent to 2.3% of the resident population, producing a net gain of 211,691. Arrivals alone came to 363% of total population change, and to just under the population of Leeds, England’s second‑largest local authority district, over twelve months.

The ratio of arrivals to net population change runs from 158% in the Eastern region to 410% in Yorkshire and the Humber, where 63,934 arrivals and 48,762 departures resolved into a population change of 15,595.

The distinction matters for anyone planning services. School places, GP registrations, housing turnover, English‑language provision and local authority caseloads respond to arrivals and departures, not to the net residual left after the two are subtracted. Planning to the net figure systematically understates the demands actually placed on local infrastructure.

Wales is shrinking

Wales lost 2,768 residents, falling to 3,175,181. Its natural change was –9,168; deaths exceeding births by a substantial margin. Internal migration from England added 4,876 and net international migration 1,657. Without those two inflows, Wales’ decline would have been more than three times steeper.

The decline is broadly spread. Swansea fell by 1,165 and Cardiff by 512, despite Cardiff recording much the largest gross international inflow in Wales at 7,587. Rural authorities are close to static (Powys down 12, Conwy down 14, Ceredigion down 30) while the former industrial valleys continue to contract, with Merthyr Tydfil down 360 and Blaenau Gwent down 119. Wales illustrates in miniature what England’s trajectory would look like without international migration on the present scale.

Seven regions, two different countries

The South East and South West are not itemised in the source workbook. As residuals they account for 75,645 of England’s population change, 32,999 of its net international migration and 57,223 of its net internal migration, against a combined natural deficit of 14,979. The South West records the lowest net international migration of any English region, at 11,311, which puts the South East at 21,688.

Two facts stand out:

1. First, London is the only English region to have lost population (down 26,737) despite receiving the largest international inflow of any region and by far the largest natural surplus, at 54,211.
   
2. Second, the West Midlands is the only region where net international migration exceeded total population change, at 124%. Its population would have fallen without it.

The North West grew most in absolute terms of any English region, adding 56,748 residents, split between internal migration of 23,771 and international migration of 34,627 against a small natural deficit. Of the regions itemised above, the Eastern region is the least migration‑dependent, at 41%, and the only one where internal migration exceeded international migration. Outside London, the six other regions in the table recorded a combined natural change of –10,440. London alone recorded +54,211. Strip out the capital and England’s births no longer replace its deaths.

London as a redistribution engine

London received 234,612 international arrivals, roughly 29% of the England and Wales total, from about 15% of its population, and a net international gain of 51,839. Over the same period it lost 131,961 people on net to the rest of the United Kingdom. Its net internal loss was more than two and a half times its net international gain.

The capital now functions as a point of entry rather than a place of settlement for a large share of arrivals. Overseas migrants concentrate in inner and outer London; existing residents move out to the Home Counties, the South West and beyond. Every inner London borough lost population over the year with two exceptions, Wandsworth and the City of London, each of which grew by fewer than 140 people. Southwark fell by 4,692, Lambeth by 4,566, Camden by 3,900, Westminster by 3,327 and Newham by 2,937, the last on a net internal outflow of 16,235. This is what makes London’s –194% figure in Figure 3 misleading if read carelessly: the capital received more international migrants than anywhere else in the country while its population fell.

The same pattern in the major cities

The London pattern repeats across England’s largest urban authorities. Birmingham recorded the largest population fall of any local authority district in England and Wales, down 5,960. It did so while receiving 26,920 international arrivals — the highest of any district — posting a net international gain of 9,703 and a natural surplus of 6,186, because 21,850 more people left for elsewhere in the UK than arrived from it.

Manchester took 19,418 arrivals for a net international gain of 8,165 and a natural surplus of 3,378, yet ended the year 341 people smaller after a net internal outflow of 11,814. Leicester fell by 3,639, Coventry by 3,941, Nottingham by 4,796 and Luton by 1,667. Each combines a substantial international gain with a larger internal outflow — from 1.9 times the international gain in Luton to 3.1 times in Nottingham. Bradford, Leeds, Sheffield and Liverpool all shrank on the same pattern.

These are not declining cities in the traditional sense. Natural change is positive in nearly all of them and international arrivals are running at high levels. They are cities experiencing exceptionally high population churn, in which the composition of the resident population changes far faster than its size. That churn is invisible in headline population figures and is precisely what those figures are least able to capture.

Where growth is domestic

The counterpart to urban outflow is growth in the shires and on the coast, almost entirely from internal migration. Essex grew by 17,197, of which 13,590 was internal. Lancashire added 16,128, Warwickshire 11,019, Leicestershire 7,971 and Derbyshire 6,304: in each case with internal migration accounting for the large majority, and in Derbyshire’s case exceeding total growth against a natural deficit of 2,263.

The pattern is starkest in rural and coastal England. Cornwall grew by 2,577 despite a natural change of –2,985 and a net international migration figure of –583, the lowest of any district: its entire increase, and more, came from 6,049 net internal arrivals. Lincolnshire grew by 3,476 on internal migration of 6,898 with net international migration of just 63. The East Riding of Yorkshire grew by 4,956 while losing 222 people to international migration.

England therefore divides into two kinds of place: districts whose growth is international, and districts whose growth is domestic redistribution, with the second group’s gains drawn substantially from the first. Neither group is well described by the national statistic that combines them.

Source: Office for National Statistics, mid‑year population estimates, year ending June 2025. Maps created with Datawrapper; map data © Crown copyright and database right 2018 / ONS Geography.

The post Migration and the geography of population change in England and Wales: ONS analysis first appeared on Migration Watch UK.