This week, the Home Office published its quarterly immigration statistics for the year ending December 2025. Here at Migration Watch. Here is our initial analysis.
The headline figures show 809,000 non-visit visas were issued in 2025: a number that, while down on recent peaks, remains enormous by any historical standard. But perhaps the most striking figure in today’s release is the number of visa extensions. Some 782,000 grants of permission to stay were made on work routes alone, a 12% increase on the previous year, with a total number of visa extensions of 1,115,667. This figure is higher than the net migration peak of 944,000 in the year to March 2023! In other words, while the Government boasts about reducing the number of people coming in through the front door, an equally large cohort is quietly extending its stay through the back; largely the result of the so-called “Boriswave”, the high volume of lower-skill workers and their dependants who came in 2022 and 2023, many of whom are now reaching the point of applying for extensions of stay and then within two or three years availing themselves of for indefinite leave to remain (and for indefinite leave to remain soon after). In reality, our immigration system now all but allows migrants to remain for good once they set foot on British soil. Only 168,000 work visas were granted to main applicants in 2025, less than a fifth of the total 2025 non-visit visa inflow. Work visas have fallen 50% from their 2023 peak, mainly due to changes to the visa process and closure of the accompanying dependant route. This led to the significant fall in Health and Social Care visas (down 91%).
The remaining 80% of non-visit visas were study visas (407,000) and family reunion (67,000), plus a significant number humanitarian and asylum claims of 110,000. Britain’s migration crisis is no longer just about jobs; it is about filling university lecture halls and, increasingly, extending stays once people are here.
The higher education sector routinely claims that international students are profitable – Universities UK International claims a net contribution of £37.4 billion. But this figure counts tuition fees and living expenditure as economic “benefits” while significantly underestimating the costs to public services. International students are entitled to use the NHS, require housing, put pressure on local infrastructure, and – as the Home Office’s own data show – over 10,000 migrants who entered Britain on student visas subsequently lodged asylum claims in 2025 alone. Moreover, with 237,000 students switching onto the Graduate Route each year, even those students who don’t claim asylum remain in Britain far beyond their initial visa period, often indefinitely.
With this context, the Green Party’s proposal to grant an amnesty to all illegal migrants is at best naïve and at worst, reckless. Under the Greens’ plans, failed asylum seekers would be allowed to stay, immigration detention would be abolished, and new arrivals would access the NHS and a wage from day one. As was argued during the Afghan crisis, millions of people from countries like Afghanistan already have huge incentives to make their way, illegally, to the UK. The 1951 Refugee Convention, the legal framework now in place and our indulgent courts could plausibly cover the entire population of Afghanistan, some 42 million people. Today, with 41,000 small boat arrivals in 2025 and the top five nationalities including Eritreans, Afghans, Iranians, Sudanese, and Somalis, the potential pool of claimants could be north of 200 million people. An amnesty would send the clear signal that reaching Britain by any means will guarantee a right to stay, work, and access public services. It would turbocharge the smuggling trade and push already strained costs on housing, asylum support, and the NHS well beyond breaking point.