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 Friday as soon as it is released.
On Wednesday, we published a short briefing paper – “No cap, no control”. That very afternoon, Mr. Sunak stood on the doorstep of No. 10 in the pouring rain to announce a general election on July 4. This came after yet another policy U-turn on legal migration, as reported by The Sun, where a group of Cabinet Ministers including Lord Cameron, Jeremy Hunt, and Gillian Keegan successfully blocked tougher proposals to limit the graduate visa scheme to elite universities.
At 9.30, the following morning, came the bombshell news that net migration for 2023 was 685,000. The Home Secretary was almost gleeful, “our plan is working, 10% down on 2022”. And yet, the figure for 2022 had also been revised upwards, again, to a record-breaking 764,000. Remember, when the provisional figure for that year was 606,000? A staggering discrepancy of 158,000 or 26%. Who’s to say that this time next year we won’t be told that for 685,000, we should read 863,000?
In the course of this parliament, net migration has added two million people to our population and four million immigrants have come to the UK. Should net migration average out at say 600,000 a year, our population will grow by 20 million people by 2046 – the equivalent of 14 or 15 new Birminghams. Immigration on this scale will mean massive demographic change and an unrecognisable Britain. As our paper points out:
“[If] current levels of migration were allowed to continue, a child born today to an indigenous British couple would be in a minority in the country of his or her parents by the time they reached their forties”.
Here’s what our chairman, Alp Mehmet, said to Julia Hartley-Brewer on Talk Radio on Thursday:
“We were lied to frankly… What [the government] did effectively is give control and authority to the universities, to employers, to bring in who they wanted and as many as they wanted. That is an absolute disgrace.”
As we make clear in our paper, it is perfectly possible both to control immigration and to reduce it, if the political will and courage are there. It can be done, as other countries have shown, by imposing a numerical cap on visas. The coalition government’s cap on non-EU citizens worked well until it was abandoned post-Brexit and replaced with an absurdly loose, points-based system. No cap, no control, and no hope of a reduction in immigration.
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 Friday as soon as it is released.