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On Thursday, there was an all but congratulatory headline in the Times:
“Number of visa applications falls by more than a third”.
“The recent figures from the Home Office signal a drop in net migration — but some claim that French sailors are handing migrants life jackets before they cross”.
The number of visa applications has fallen by 37%, to 772,000, in the year to March, down from 1.24 million in the previous 12 months. Net migration (728,000 in the year to June 2024, which was also lower than the 2023 record high of 906,000) is expected to “tumble”.
Of course, the expected falls are welcome. But there is a hell of a long way to go. The falls are a direct result of the measures the Tories belatedly put in place and largely follow the withdrawal of the right to bring dependants from students coming for one-year master’s courses and care-worker visa holders, also the increase in earnings thresholds for skilled workers and family visas.
Nothing this government has done so far will reduce immigration. Migration will continue at damagingly high levels for so long as it does nothing to tackle and constrain immigration.
The sheer scale of immigration has now reached the point at which it is changing the nature of our country and threatening serious social tensions. We are already seeing the damaging impact of uncontrolled immigration while also importing divisions and conflicts relating to foreign lands. The riots last summer are an indication of some of the underlying tensions that already exist. The rapid population increase and resulting change of our society will have severe social and economic impacts with serious implications for the future stability and cohesion of our country.
The immediate pressures are without precedent. As we have already mentioned, UK net migration in 2023 was close to one million—nearly the population of the city of Birmingham. The provisional figure for the year to the end of June 2024 is approaching 750,000.
Furthermore, and please forgive us for banging on about it, but bang on about it we must. The 30 years between 1991 and 2021 saw the proportion of “white British” in the UK fall from 95% to just under 75% while the ethnic minority quintupled. In the twenty years between the 2001 and 2021 censuses the overall population increase was 8 million of which nearly 7 million was due to migrants and their children.
The government is now on its knees—praying this time, not taking it—hoping that net migration will come down to manageable levels. Yvette Cooper wants to believe the liberal economists and mass-immigration-cum open borders zealots, who say net migration is tumbling. Really? The assumption that net migration will settle at an annual 340,000 from 2029 is for the birds. But even if it does, with population increase now being driven solely by migration—remember, the ONS has said that by 2032 (the next census will be in 2031) the population will have increased by a further 6.2 million of which 6.1 million will be due to immigration (migrants plus their children.) As things are, all population increase will come from migration. Indeed, it already is…
Meanwhile, the birth rate of the“white British” population has fallen sharply. The reasons for this are not clear but, if it stays very low, and if immigration were to continue at much higher levels than the hoped—for 340,000 per annum, we simply get to the day when the “white British” become a minority a few years sooner than we will if annual net migration were to settle at around a third of a million. Children born to native British parents would be a minority in schools much earlier.
There is no public support for immigration on anything like this scale, nor has there ever been. Indeed, the public have never been asked if they wanted immigration on such a colossal scale. They most certainly don’t.
This is a preview of Migration Watch’s free weekly newsletter. Please consider signing up to the newsletter directly, you can do so here and will receive an email copy of the newsletter every week as soon as it is released.