Between four and five million net migrants are set to the come to and remain in the UK by 2041, according to speculative, interim projections by the Office for National Statistics.
This calculation is made up of 12 million immigrants projected to come and 7 million projected to leave.
Meanwhile, natural UK population change is projected to be minus over a million over the same period.
The overall impact is expected to be a UK population rise of 3.4 million – from 67 million now to 70.4 million. About all of this increase would be driven by immigration.
The estimate was contained in the latest ONS population projections.
The net migration assumption in the ONS’ principal (only) projection is that from the year ending mid 2027 onwards, average annual net international migration to the UK will be plus 205,000, falling from 250,000 in 2020/21.
It doesn’t incorporate estimates for illegal immigration – now running much higher than during the period 2018-2020 (with nearly 30,000 people arriving here without permission in boats during 2021).
It is not at all clear why the ONS thinks net immigration will fall to 200,000 per year from its pre-pandemic average of 250,000 per year. This is highly unlikely in view of the mass of new routes into the UK that the government has opened (e.g. for mass resettlement of Afghans and Hong Kongers) and the huge weakening of global work visas (including removal of the annual cap on numbers) which means that a) those in 80% of the world’s countries now find it easier to come here than prior to 2021 b) a new route opened in July 2021 which means an unlimited number of non-UK students are able to stay on even in the lowest-paid jobs (with no cap or no salary / skill threshold).
The government is also considering advice from official experts which calls for loosening of a work visa used primarily by IT companies which has no English language requirement and which has been abused on a rampant scale in recent years (Intra-Company Transfers).
Inexplicably the ONS also seem to also think asylum seeker net migration will fall from 34,000 in 2020/21 to 24,000 from 2027 onwards. (In the year to September 2021 asylum claims were the highest since 2004).
Given the sharp rise in illegal Channel crossings in small boats since the start of the year, this seems highly unlikely. Indeed, the Home Office itself projected 80,000 people being housed in asylum-related housing by Spring of this year (up from 60,000 by Autumn 2021).
The ONS also project a total of 25,000 Afghans being resettled (despite the fact that the government just admitted there had been 100,000 applications for the Afghan Relocation and Assistance Policy, for staff who worked with UK forces, in the course of less than a year since the scheme was opened).
There are already about 12,000 Afghans housed in hotels. About 4,000 people have been placed in housing around the country. In total, around 16,000 here already following the takeover of that country by the Taliban last year.
The UK has already taken 25,000 people from Syria since 2015, as well 60,000 family members of refugees. This on top of 30,000 to 40,000 asylum applicants per year.
To read more about the net migration assumptions published by the ONS, see Table 1 of this link: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationprojections/methodologies/nationalpopulationprojectionsmigrationassumptions2020basedinterim
You can see our comment on these projections (quoted by The Times) here. Commenting, Alp Mehmet, Chairman of Migration Watch UK, said:
“These projections point to the impact of mass immigration and uncontrolled borders, with more than two million people expected to come from overseas than leave over the next decade.
Indeed, about all of population growth over the period is likely to be due to immigration. England is already the most crowded nation in Europe.
“When is the government going to get serious about controlling immigration in the way that they have so clearly failed to do so far?”