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In last year‘s end-of-year newsletter, we dubbed 2022 a year of broken records and broken promises. At that point, legal migration for the year ending June 2022 had set a new record of 504,000. This was much as we predicted would happen in light of the scandalously loose points-based system that was introduced at the start of 2021. Meanwhile, illegal immigration by small boat rocketed to 45,000. Again, much as we forecast would happen if firm action was not taken.
We proposed a number of measures that we believed were necessary if immigration was to be reduced; as the public had been calling for, and indeed been promised, in successive elections.
We hoped that flights to Rwanda would finally get off the ground and illegal Channel crossings begin to be tackled in earnest – we should add here that while we always believed that removal to a safe third country would help, it would not be the complete answer. We should say, we are not convinced that flights to Rwanda will ever get off the ground in any meaningful way before the election.
As for an overall reduction in legal migration, we said that for this to happen, employers needed to wean themselves off cheap, lower-skill, foreign labour and make greater effort to up-skill the British workforce.
We went on to say that in Suella Braverman, “we finally have a Home Secretary who seems to get it and mean it”. Indeed, for all the records that had been broken last year, we could at least hope that with a new Home Secretary and a Prime Minister seemingly determined to ‘stop the boats’, there would be tangible progress made towards reducing both legal and illegal immigration.
This is a preview of Migration Watch’s free weekly newsletter. You can read the full version here.
Please consider signing up to the newsletter directly, you can do so here and will receive an email copy of the newsletter every Friday as soon as it is released.