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The sheer scale of immigration remains at unprecedented levels, and continues to put more and more pressure on housing, the NHS and other services while threatening serious social tensions; already in evidence. And yet, all we get from the government is waffle about how it is dealing with the problem. Take the government response to this petition on the government/parliament website:
“We believe our country is facing serious challenges both from legal and illegal migration and think the only way to deal with this is to suspend all immigration temporarily for 5 years.”
The petition was launched at the end of November and quickly attracted 100,000 signatures. Nearly 220,000 have now signed. It has led to the government agreeing time for a debate in Parliament that will take place on Monday 10th March.
The government gave an initial response on 17th January when the Home Office published this response. The full response follows this introduction: “The Government is taking the tough action required to reduce both illegal immigration and overall net migration, without the economic damage that would come from suspending immigration entirely.”
The response continued, “The Prime Minister and Home Secretary have also repeatedly made clear their intention to reduce illegal immigration by dismantling the criminal smuggling gangs behind the trafficking of migrants across the Channel, by cracking down on illegal working within the UK, and by increasing the removal and returns of people with no right to be in this country.”
In practice, Sir Keir Starmer and his Home Secretary have gone backwards on illegal immigration and stayed where the Tories left matters on legal immigration. We wrote last week about the evidence provided by our chairman, Alp Mehmet, and Professor (Emeritus) David Coleman, to the Public Bill Committee for the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, the limp legislation now going through parliament. We said the legislation would more likely encourage the gangs, wherever they are, than discourage them.
Meanwhile, migrants who have it in mind to jump into a dinghy and make their way to our shores will not be in the least deterred by the toothless Bill. Witness the numbers coming over in their hundreds whenever the wind drops and the sea is calm. Close to 4,000 have crossed so far in 2025, the highest number for the same period since 2018, when it all started.
The government has also boasted of migrants without leave being removed – 19,000 since they came to office. What they don’t tell us is how many of those removed came illegally and how many left voluntarily, persuaded by a £3,000 handout (per family member) to sweeten the blow.
With regard to legal migration, the Home Office told us in the same response to the petition that they would:
- • Restrict most overseas students from bringing family members to the UK;
• Restrict the ability of care workers to bring dependants with them and require all care providers sponsoring migrants to register with the Care Quality Commission;
• Increase the general salary threshold for those arriving on Skilled Worker visas from £26,200 to £38,700; and
• Abolish the 20% going rate discount so that employers can no longer pay migrants less than UK workers in shortage occupations.
These are all measures that were put in place or proposed by the Tories. They have had some effect on net migration. But the changes are nowhere near sufficient to reduce net migration to the extent necessary. The higher salary threshold for skilled worker visas is well-below the level needed to push employers to turn to the domestic workforce.
We are told the government accepts that net migration is too high and wants to reduce it. All we would like to know is when it will happen, and how? The government is now, effectively, waiting for the Migration Advisory Committee to tell it what to do. That’s not good enough, Sir Keir. The government should be looking at how to reduce immigration not at how to reduce the need for it – the assumption being that mass immigration is essential and we can’t manage without it. This is simply false.
As things are, net migration is likely to remain well above 500,000, while illegal immigration – and not just those coming in dinghies – will continue unabated. Rapid, and unprecedented, population growth will be driven entirely by migration and children born to migrants. The ethnic minority proportion of the population, which quintupled between the 1991 and 2021 censuses, will go on growing.
And of course, the time when the indigenous (i.e. the white British, as the ONS describes them) will become a minority in the country of their forebears much sooner, perhaps by the mid-2050s.
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.