More people immigrated to UK in 2022 than any other year in history

Some 105 million people passed through the UK border into the country last year, with the number of those opting for extended stays exceeding 500,000 for the first time.

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Neither the energy crisis, the cost of living, the more stringent immigration system, the food nor the weather deterred record-breaking numbers of people from settling in the UK last year. The country continues to attract the brightest students, lure talented workers, and provide a safe harbour for thousands of desperate refugees. The number of those crossing the Channel illegally in small boats also shot up, prompting the Home Office's introduction of the controversial Illegal Migration Bill this week. Here, Express.co.uk breaks down the numbers for all of 2022’s arrivals.

An estimated 104.9 million people crossed the UK border into the country last year. This was over three times as many as the previous year – principally due to pandemic travel restrictions – but less than the 146.3 million recorded in 2019.

However, new Home Office data show more people than ever opted to stay in the country long-term, as net migration surpassed 500,000 for the first time.

According to the latest Census data, 10 million usual residents in England and Wales were born outside of the UK in 2021 – 16.8 percent of the total.

This proportion is growing, and fast. In 2011, the 7.5 million foreign-born made up 13.4 percent of the population – in 2001 the 4.6 million figure represented just 8.9 percent of those living in Britain.

British citizenship was granted to 175,972 people in 2022, around a quarter of which were originally from the EU. This figure is ten percent higher than the 2019 tally.

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The Home Office issued 2,836,490 visas in 2022 – around half of which went to short-term visitors. This figure is far less than the total number of arrivals owing to the high proportion of returning Brits, as well as travellers from a host of countries that do not require a visa to enter the UK, such as the US.

In 2022, there were 485,758 sponsored study visas issued to main applicants – 81 percent more than in 2019. A similar surge was noted for work visas, the 267,670 total almost double the pre-pandemic figure.

In response to Beijing’s encroachment on Hong Kong’s autonomy, the British Government introduced the British National (Overseas) route for residents to live, work, and study freely in the UK. There have been a total of 160,700 applications over the past two years. On March 1, the scheme received funding for another year.

A further 34,338 EU Settlement Scheme permits were issued in 2022 to family members of people from the EU, European Economic Area (EEA), and Switzerland – almost six times the number that was granted in 2019 (6,611).

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The UK has a long history of taking in those fleeing conflict at home. In just the past decade, the Government put in place special resettlement schemes for people from Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine and elsewhere.

Asylum seekers are people “seeking protection from persecution and serious human rights violations in another country” who have yet to be legally recognised as a refugee, according to Amnesty International.

The Refugee Council says 74,751 asylum applications were made in the UK in 2022 – a 49 percent increase on 2021 – of which three-quarters were accepted.

According to the latest UNHCR statistics, as of November 2022, there were 231,597 refugees in the UK. Around 150,000 of them were from Ukraine under the humanitarian visa schemes set up in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion a year ago.

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The UK’s asylum system does, however, have a significant and growing backlog. By the end of last year, 160,919 people were waiting for an outcome on their initial claim for asylum – over triple the outstanding figure by the close of 2019.

Record numbers have turned to illegal smugglers to get them across the English Channel. There were 45,755 people detected arriving by small boats in 2022 – 60 percent more than the 28,526 total in 2021.

Without a pact with the EU, it is difficult to send arrivals on the southern coast back, further filling the country’s dangerously overcrowded emergency accommodation facilities.

Enforced returns – the vast majority of which are Foreign National Offenders (FNOs) – have been in decline since a 2012 peak. In the 12 months to September 2022, 3,531 people were deported – 51 percent fewer than in 2019 pre-pandemic (7,198).

At an event by UK in a changing Europe headlined “Immigration after Brexit: where are we going?” – taking place just days after the Home Secretary unveiled the Illegal Migration Bill on Tuesday – experts sought to contextualise these figures.

On the question of whether he thought the bill was likely to work, Colin Yeo of Garden Court Chambers answered: “Probably not.” At the end of the day, he said, a bill is “just a piece of paper” that cannot physically prevent people from reaching British shores.

Mr Yeo also believes the bill’s provisions – removing all those who arrived illegally and preventing them from ever returning – will be both near-impossible to implement and a poor deterrent.

“Essentially it scraps the UK asylum system,” he said, highlighting the scale of the task of working through the current backlog and then deporting the tens of thousands that will arrive in future. Given how the Rwanda policy played out, he believes the Home Office will struggle immensely, as it fails to realise “how hard it will be, how brutal it will be or how violent it will be” in practice.

All of these figures underlie the fact that the UK has long been, and remains an attractive country to live in.

According to the latest migration survey by Gallup, 900 million people – 16 percent of the world’s adult population – reported being keen to leave their home country permanently in 2021.

The UK was found to be the sixth most desirable destination of the 200-odd on offer, the pollster’s projections showing that roughly 36 million were interested.

The 2022 World Values Survey carried out by King’s College London reveals that Brits are also particularly welcoming to foreigners. Among a group of 17 peer countries, the UK was found to be the least likely to say the Government ought to impose strict immigration limits.

Just 31 percent of respondents held a negative attitude towards new arrivals in the UK, relative to 35 percent in Germany, and 39 percent in Canada – the next-most accepting countries by this metric.

Professor Bobby Duffy, director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London, said: “It was unthinkable a decade ago that the UK would top any international league table for positive views of immigration.

“Some of the drivers of this extraordinary shift are clear in how we see the contribution of immigrants to our economy and services – we’re now the least likely to think immigration increases unemployment, and second from top in thinking that immigrants fill important job vacancies. We’re also very likely to say immigration boosts cultural diversity, while very unlikely to think immigration comes with crime and safety risks.”