Britain is more concerned about immigration than any other country on earth. That is not a campaigning slogan: it is the finding of Gallup’s inaugural World’s Most Important Problem report, published this week. Across 107 countries surveyed, the United Kingdom stands alone at the top. Just over one in five Britons (21%) named immigration as the most important problem facing the country. The global median was just 1%. Only six other nations saw even one in ten adults name immigration as their top concern, and it was not the leading issue in any of them.
This should give pause to every politician and commentator who has spent years dismissing public concern as tabloid hysteria or driven by the far-right. How insulting this is. Millions of British people know exactly what concerns them, even if they don’t always know the actual numbers. Dominic Cummings recently published results from a deep market research project involving focus groups of swing voters. The Westminster assumption is that media coverage causes voters to overestimate the scale of immigration. The opposite is true. When asked to estimate net migration since January 2021, voters consistently guessed figures between 50,000 and 700,000 (between five and thirty times lower than reality). When shown the actual numbers and graphs running back to 1997, they were, in Cummings’s words, “almost all shocked.”
The British public knows enough to be more worried about immigration than any other comparable country, yet, as often as not, they are not aware of just how large the numbers truly are. As they become more familiar with the true picture, their concern only grows. Net migration peaked at 944,000 in the year ending March 2023. The figure for calendar year 2022, initially reported as 606,000, was revised upward again and again – to 745,000, then 764,000, then 872,000. Net migration in the last parliament alone exceeded two million, with total inflows of around four million.
Zoom out and the scale becomes staggering. Between 1997 and 2010, net migration by non-British nationals totalled over three million. Since 2010, a further 2.7 million were added. The foreign-born population of England and Wales, less than 4% in 1951, had reached roughly 19% – around 11.4 million people – by 2023.
Migration Watch has consistently warned about these trends, often years before official data confirmed them. In 2002, we estimated non-EU net migration would run at two million over the following decade. We were met with derision. The ONS later confirmed the figure at 2.1 million. In 2003, when Home Office research projected 5,000–13,000 annual arrivals after EU enlargement, we called those estimates “almost worthless.” EU8 net migration averaged 72,000 per year. Time and again, the establishment underestimated and we were vindicated.
The conclusion is simple and unsettling. The only reason public concern is not even higher than it already is – and it is already the one of the highest anywhere – is that most people do not know the actual numbers. They do not know the cumulative total since 1997 runs into the many millions. Between 2001 and 2021, our population, as MW has often pointed out, grew by 8 million: nearly 7 million of which was due to migration and children born to migrants. Meanwhile, the ethnic minority proportion continues to grow at pace as White British numbers decline. The very nature of our society is changing rapidly while the concerns of the majority are brushed aside.
As for Sir James Ratcliffe being pilloried for what he said, and the huge fuss it has caused: while he may have got some of his figures and dates out of kilter, his underlying message was bang on. He was articulating a concern that Sir Keir Starmer echoed in May 2025, when he warned that Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers,” a phrase he later said he regretted using only because Enoch Powell had said something similar. The broader point remains, mass immigration, coupled with seriously flawed approaches to diversity and multiculturalism, has been costly, divisive, and corrosive to the very foundations of our society.