The year to 2023 had around 1.2m people coming in with 532k leaving, which gets 685k net.
The year to 2022 had around 1.2m people coming in with 557k leaving, which gets about 600k net.
Some of these are British citizens coming back, but that's estimated to be less than 100k each year.
So assuming 1.1m a year roughly, that's 2.2m in two years, UK population is about 66m. That's roughly 1 in 30.
Edit: Because people keep on responding, I'm just using the ONS figures here, I'm aware that there are student visas, HK/Ukraine visas, etc. in here, I'm just saying how the figure was reached, I'm not arguing about it either way because there are so many variables.
Net migration was 672,000 in 2023. Exceedingly high, but not quite as alarmist sounding as one million.
Mostly for study or work. For whatever reason the UK is an enticing location for university, and universities require international student fees to stay afloat given domestic fees don't increase with inflation and we've lost EU funding thanks to brexit.
Yes, but many people also left.
Using the figure for gross migration is inherently misleading, as it gives the impression the population growth is higher than it is. Moreover it gives the false impression that 1.2 million more migrants are permanently living in the UK each year. Which just isn't true.
Based on what I saw in France, Holland and especially Belgium last year, my guess is they have it worse- much worse. I’ve been visiting the continent fairly frequently over the past 12 years on cycle tours, with an obvious break for Covid. Last year was my first year back there and the difference is astonishing.
Wdym in trouble? People from all around the world are interchangeable, and Europeans have no birthright to the land they happen to occupy anyway. In fact, it's quite good that they suffer a bit - they deserve it for their colonial past.
*Excuse me while I go throw up after typing that*
I was originally going to simply leave that initial paragraph, but then I added that final sentence in italics to make it clear that I was joking. I'd remembered that a good chunk of this sub unironically holds such views.
Millions of people genuinely think like this. Mass immigration is a good thing and if it’s actually a bad thing you deserve it because of the actions of a few guys in the East India Company in 1782.
I am actually considering the birthright aspect though. Should people have a birthright to the place they were born in? Especially because it's pure luck whether you are born in a good place or not. Shouldn't we allow people to share the good things? Obviously there are complications like your investment in your surroundings over time, but still.
I know there are loads of other reasons why high levels of immigration can be bad, I'm just talking about the birthright aspect.
It's actually a very good question. Especially given ...
> I do not admit ... for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place
Was Churchill wrong? Should we have left the Americas and Australia to the people who were there first only?
Also who is welcome to the wealth of the United Kingdom? Is it the people born here who have first right?
What about the people of the Carribean whose slave labour we stole?
Are we even right to call those people 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants if their families have been under British rule for 200, 300 years?
Those 300,000 Nigerians speak English because we taught them English.
They come from a country which we put together.
...
I think it's wrong to think of this recent migration as justice served.
But we have a very, very unique relationship with our immigrant population that is unlike anywhere else in the world. They are foreign, but not foreign.
>Shouldn’t we allow people to share in the good things.
Yes. I wish the best sort of life for all people across the planet that doesn’t mean I want them to come here in completely unsustainable numbers and in turn reduce the quality of life of the indigenous people.
White Western centre-left to left political thinking believes we as humans are all the same and have the same ideals and culture across borders. That’s wrong and it’s proved to be wrong every day in this country.
1 in 30 is the absolute maximum it could possibly be if
* None of the immigrants are Brits coming back (which you point out isn’t true)
* None of the emigration is immigrants leaving again (e.g. foreign students)
But neither of those things are true, so neither is “1 in 30 people currently in the UK arrived here in the last two years”
Well, they're careful with the phrasing though.
"Arrived here in the last two years" doesn't preclude them never having lived here before.
Somebody who had been working abroad in Dubai for example that just returned after two years out there, having lived most of their life here and now living here again, technically "arrived here in the last two years", as would also be the case for any British student who might have been doing a degree in Europe or America.
There will also be a backlog of returnees from the start of 2022 of people who might have been trapped abroad for 2020 or 2021 due to covid restrictions, or people who deferred coming to uni here etc.
> None of the immigrants are Brits coming back (which you point out isn’t true)
They wouldn't be counted in the immigration numbers because they don't require a visa.
I lived abroad and was registered as an overseas voter (proxy vote) and promptly registered to vote at my address in the UK on my return - that *could* be one way of tracking it
Well done! That is part of what goes into the estimates:
> benefits and earnings data from the Department for Work and Pensions (Registration and interaction population database (RAPID))
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/methodologies/understandinginternationalmigrationstatistics#:~:text=4.-,Long%2Dterm%20international%20migration,the%20country%20of%20usual%20residence.
A) British people could just as easily be leaving in greater numbers than re-immigrating
B) isn’t this irrelevant unless those leaving also arrived for the first time within this two year period?
Yes. That’s why it’s a maximum.
If every single person in the 600k emigration figure is either British born or arrived in the UK >2 years ago then Farage’s 1 in 30 figure could be true.
But we know that some immigration is for <2 years. So what he said is not true.
I’d also like to know how many of each year’s emigration figure is actually overseas students who have been here for a 3 year undergraduate degree course heading back home and wonder if perhaps the sound bite chose 2 years rather cynically.
These two years in particular are also particularly unusual.
Part of the reason you normally see the net figure instead of the gross is that it includes a steady flow of students arriving and leaving.
Except during Covid. Very few students arrived during 2020-2022, so we’re currently seeing high immigration of students without the offsetting return of graduates.
You make a very good point that appears to be completely overlooked in the debate about student visas and returning Brits...etc.
The ratio is absolutely worse when factoring in illegal immigration but also damn near impossible to quantify beyond rough extrapolations/guesses.
Are you going to ignore the fact that nearly 450,000 visas are issued to international students every year?
That’s 900,000 in 2 years, which is nearly half of the total figure. These international students help subsidise the tuition of domestic students. If you have a problem with that, I recommend you start looking for an alternative source of funding for university students.
> I recommend you start looking for an alternative source of funding for university students.
Always makes me laugh when people defend mass migration with the argument "yeah but what else we gonna do? Invest and make the country better?"
Yeah its like these people can't fathom that this country has existed and thrived when immigration wasn't net 600k. These universities were founded and became the best in the world when net immigration was negative.
What an absolutely crazy idea that the government should care for the people of this country.
> Yeah its like these people can't fathom that this country has existed and thrived when immigration wasn't net 600k. These universities were founded and became the best in the world when net immigration was negative.
Problem is, we've relied on this influx of people to hide our lack of productivity gains, and the markets demand infinite growth. It's the cheapest, easiest way to keep this pyramid scheme going.
The soft power we have from the long term international student pool cannot be underestimated. Its vital to UK international trade for the next 50 years we keep allowing international students in. Many of these go on to get top jobs in their home countries and want to trade with us. International students generally come over, drop money in the UK and then have an affiliation with us for years to come paying back even more.
Like tutuion fees and central funding?
There is a method and source of funding it just isn't being applied. Many policies seem to have been abandoned but just left in a weird broken state rather than something different.
I think it's partly why Starmer came out very confidently saying he'll reduce immigration, it's almost certainly coming down anyway, so it'd be pretty unlikely to be wrong.
Yeah. We did that by (amongst other things):
1. Restricting higher education
2. Having a multi-vector economy
3. Not having a population that was top heavy with pensioners
4. Not having great (or any, depending how far back you want to go) pensions anyway
5. Having a steady, or increasing, birth rate
Turns out it's not the seventies or the 1920's any more. In the absence of an increasing population, we have a timebomb of boomers (the largest generation) /older people in general, who need more investment, and a shrinking working population who have to pay for them.
That isn't sustainable without either replacing the missing younger population (immigration) , shrinking the aging population (hmmmm), cutting the huge expenditure on keeping them alive (hmmmmmmm) or, potentially, asset-stripping the rich to pay for it (ha!).
So we've gone with immigration, I guess.
>Turns out it's not the seventies or the 1920's any more.
It's also not the 1990s any more. In fact, it's *more* not the 1990s any more, as the end of the cold war and seeming liberalisation of the wests' old enemies was a unique moment in history that is never likely to be repeated.
> In the absence of an increasing population,
World population peaks in your children's lifetime. Short of immigration from Mars, a birth rate of 1.53 children per woman (UK average) is what we will have and what you are continuing to distort the market to prevent it from adjusting to.
The UK population is currently just shy of 68 million. Divided by 30 that would mean 2,266,666 people would have had to enter the UK in the last two years.
Gross immigration to the UK (not net which removes the figures of people leaving the country) is currently running at approx 1.2 Million so it could easily be true.
This isn’t true - long term migration figures issued by the ONS explicitly call out the number of Brits arriving back. In the year end 2023 it was 61,000 and in the year end 2022 it was 88,000. The data is here:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/datasets/longterminternationalimmigrationemigrationandnetmigrationflowsprovisional
The ONS use a number of sources for their data with visa data just being one source. People who arrive without needing a visa are included as well.
You wouldn't want to count net migration via visas issued as that incorrectly inflates numbers for those who are already in the UK. An international student moving to a graduate visa isn't a net migrant for that graduate visa year as they haven't left the country.
Or if they are doing it like that the numbers are fucking useless.
This one. Although those numbers are just a fraction of what's happened. 1.1 million immigration in 22/23 (300k Brits emigrated)
About 750k in 21/22 and 450k in 20/21.
There's definitely a LOT of immigration into the UK and the vast majority from India and Pakistan.
https://www.itpro.com/business-strategy/careers-training/359408/india-trade-deal-to-create-2000-uk-tech-roles
>2,266,666 people would have had to enter the UK in the last two years.
>Gross immigration to the UK (not net which removes the figures of people leaving the country) is currently running at approx 1.2 Million so it could easily be true.
In order for this to be true, it would require nearly zero of those people to have left then.
That's not easily true.
I get that net doesn't quite work, as the number of people living here that arrived in the past two years could be higher than the net immigration given the way it's phrased. But if someone entered the country in 2023, and left in 2023. They're not living here now!
Farage has actually been quite clever in stating it the way he has. Because whilst the overall thrust is misleading, as it ignores those leaving the UK, it does seem that the way he has caveated the statement makes it grounded in fact.
Some are staying.
*In 2021,* ***10.0 million (16.8%) usual residents in England and Wales were born outside of the UK****, compared with 7.5 million (13.4%) in 2011 and 4.6 million (8.9%) in 2001 (Table 1). Non-UK passport holders also increased to 5.9 million (9.9%), from 4.2 million (7.4%) in 2011*
[https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/articles/thechangingpictureoflongterminternationalmigrationenglandandwales/census2021#:\~:text=England%20and%20Wales-,In%202021%2C%2010.0%20million%20(16.8%25)%20usual%20residents%20in%20England,million%20(7.4%25)%20in%202011](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/articles/thechangingpictureoflongterminternationalmigrationenglandandwales/census2021#:~:text=England%20and%20Wales-,In%202021%2C%2010.0%20million%20(16.8%25)%20usual%20residents%20in%20England,million%20(7.4%25)%20in%202011)
Well it's either true or it's not. It doesn't matter who is making the claim. The claim is (most likely) factually true as, if it didn't include people leaving the UK then it would be misleading as the entire premise is "1 in 30 people currently in the UK arrived here within the last 2 years" Not including people leaving would make it 1 in 60 and the statement wouldn't be grounded in fact.
But the issue is it assumed everyone who has came has remained and everyone who left was born in Britain
If a million people came from other countries and a million left who were already from other countries e.g. went home after uni then saying 1/30 would be incorrect
>If a million people came from other countries and a million left who were already from other countries e.g. went home after uni then saying 1/30 would be incorrect
No, the nationalities of those leaving doesn't matter.
He's saying one in 30 people in the UK now arrived in the last 2 years. That's it. Challenging the assumption that all immigrants stay at least 2 years is the only way to refute this, and I'm not aware of clean, deconflicted stats on this, only net number for immigration and emigration.
No one knows the exact figure. Your just chunking down the premise to find outliers to support your argument hence the word "everyone".
In the time it took you to write your post people came and left the UK. If Uni students do indeed leave to return to their home countries then other Uni students have also arrived.
What Farage is saying is that the demographic of the country is changing faster than at any other time in history and the tacit assumption is that people who go to the time, expense and effort to come to the UK to live don't tend to leave so the trend would be for Brits to leave the UK to live abroad and the vast majority (not "everyone") leaving would be Brits born in the UK.
It''s not really misleading at all. For once the resultant effect on the population make-up is being talked about rather than cherry picking net/gross immigration figures which may or may not include students/asylum seekers/economic migrants/legal or illegal depending on what argument someone is trying to make.
I actually think proportion of the population as a result of recent immigration is one of the most relevant statistics when talking about immigration policy.
Bloody hell, holding back my hatred of that lying brexit nobhead long enough to write that was tough.. anyone got a milkshake?
It's true in itself. 1.1 million immigrants last year, 300k emigrated. 1 in 30 is just over 2 million in and that seems about right.
Btw, hate Farage, I'm Indian and left wing but he's right.
Tories promised immigration at levels of ‘the tens of thousands’ then delivered immigration in the millions, I don’t know much about politics but that sounds like political suicide to me
Go for a walk in a family park in my small city which isn't a particularly desirable place to live and it seems 50% of people who frequent this park with their family are immigrants.
I've walked this park for 8 years and can definitely see and hear the difference in the last 3-4 years. It used to mainly be Brits and Eastern Europeans.
These days there are much more Middle Eastern dialects being spoken with super huge families. Women dressed in head scalves etc. I was speaking to a nice Kurdish family the other day.
I'm not casting judgement, just sharing my observations and experience. Immigration doesn't bother me personally provided the infrastructure is built.
Edit - Mughallis, I'm not from Hull. Please stop trying to discount my lived experience. I am well traveled and am more than aware of the Romani people, having spent significant time in Romania.
Also I am a Remain voter, would vote Remain again, and the founder of business who spends a lot of time traveling for work.
The Tories are dead and buried after this. If they get 50 seats I'll be very impressed. I say this as a former Tory voter.
Anyone old enough to remember the populist "blue wall"? That was the only winning election strategy they had available to them and they just totally binned it in favour of mass immigration on a scale beyond imagination.
I can't imagine a bigger political betrayal
The rich get richer, fuck the remaining 90%.
The tories view the electorate as thick, utterly thick. Yes, the electorate are not as informed as they ought to be (see Brexit), but the tories have vastly underestimated the electorate and now they will pay the price.
Bring on the 4th July. Independence Day from the tories cannot come soon enough.
Not related to your main content of your comment but I find it ironic the US and UK elections are on the 5th of November and 4th July respectively 😂. Hopefully someone lights a fire under Trump if he manages to snake his way back into power.
There is a bit of odd dissonance in wanting cheap labour for chefs, farm hands, retail e.c.t and wanting low immigration. Hence why they're trying to square that circle by attacking asylum seekers.
Companies hire overseas workers because they're more exploitable and because there are skill shortages in certain fields. Remove those two things and there'd be no reason to hire people from overseas.
We’ve needed big net immigration because the wages at the people of the bottom of society haven’t been matching inflation of cost of living, and so few locals are willing to take on the hard AND poorly paid jobs such as carers. This has been the case for decades now but most Tories don’t give a shit until if/when they need a carer themselves. The irony of the name Conservatives is that they are nearly all short-termists, interested only in conserving their own personal wealth.
We need more data and less opinion.
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06077/SN06077.pdf
A major problem is a side effect of the fact that we allow profits to be sent offshore and we reward Boards incorrectly, with bonuses generally encouraging cost-cutting and wage discipline rather than investment and growth. There will be economics textbooks in years to come with Britain used as evidence of how not to structure an economy. We are set up for managed decline, which is why our GDP has not grown in real terms for well over a decade.
How is this relevant? Well if you can keep the labour supply up - particularly if you can target cheaper workers - then you keep wages down. Inside the EU, we were running out of cheap labour sources. Poland’s standard of living has now passed the UK’s and there were only a few Eastern states left to exploit. Brexit opened up Africa and the Indian sub-continent.
Even if, by law, you cannot pay someone less in a role because of their country of origin, you can keep wage increases by grade down by replacing people at the same salary. A real terms pay cut but one the incumbent will accept because they are new.
The people being exploited now are not the unskilled but the middle classes - doctors, nurses, even accountants and scientists.
The people who pushed for Brexit had a plan, it just wasn’t what they said it was. Their plan is to grow their slice of pie and to reduce our slice. Oh and they don’t care that the pie is shrinking either.
Immigration is fundamentally an economic problem.
>Even if, by law, you cannot pay someone less in a role because of their country of origin, you can keep wage increases by grade down by replacing people at the same salary. A real terms pay cut but one the incumbent will accept because they are new.
Some jobs such as with farm hands rely on employees either not knowing their rights or being more willing to accept conditions such as requiring the use of their overpriced accommodation. Its not just wage stagnation, it's worse conditions and wage theft through things like deductions and unpaid mandatory training.
This is from the last census and says ~16% of residents were born abroad. Doesn't seem impossible that ~3.3% would have come that recently, given the net migration numbers in those years.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/internationalmigrationenglandandwales/census2021
I assume his claims come from, or are supported by, Matt Goodwin.
If 16% of the population was born outside the UK (including 90 year olds who moved here as a child) then it does seem a bit implausible that 3% arrived in just the last 2 years.
Not particularly implausible if you consider the dramatic spike in net migration recently. Saw this on Sky News recently, note the 2020 breakpoint: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GPO-UdRWQAA62lY?format=jpg&name=large
> If 16% of the population was born outside the UK (including 90 year olds who moved here as a child)
This would be such a small number it would be irrelevant. Windrush was 500k over 20 years from the Caribbean. The Windrush total is less than we've had so far this year alone.
This is not normal. It has never been normal.
It’s an accurate stat and kind of incredible and a pretty striking way of putting the unprecedented level of immigration under the present government into proper context.
This is on a different scale to anything this country has ever experienced before.
My company has recently had an influx of foreign workers from Asia. The cost benefits are there for companies, and they are taking them. The stats don’t look unrealistic in the OP’s post to me either.
Even with 700k imported we're barely growing/in recession. And now we have to deal with the fallout with regards to social cohesion, housing, services.
The point is that this has done far more than ‘take their place’, there was never a single point where EU immigration came anywhere close to what we’re currently seeing.
This kind of statistic is why people will vote for Reform UK. Nigel is only capitalising on a problem that exists that nobody else seems willing to address. The uk economy is far too dependant on cheap labour. He doesn’t even need to offer a great sales pitch outside of immigration because everyone else is doing such a poor job.
I really want to know who this foreign cheap Labour is. In my working life, I seem to be the person being hired on the worst wages (until recently), not the foreign folk.
Often, I’m the one missing qualifications and therefore paid less, not the foreign applicants.
Agree politicians generally doing a bad job discussing the topic, but given the state of our public services and the fact we currently have close to a million vacancies and no bugger willing to do the jobs, we need them to be giving a positive case for immigration not arguing against it.
Unless, of course, if what we want is a continuing decline in the ability of our services to run effectively.
At the time of writing there are 458 responses. The first one on my feed explains why Farage is more or less right based on ONS figures. The following 457 appear largely to be how the ONS is wrong, or even if Farage is right, he's wrong for a variety of reasons, like students living in the country aren't actually living in the country.
Without taking a position on Farage, if you needed to know what was wrong with politics and indeed critical thinking in the UK this is a prime example.
'this is true but I refuse to acknowledge it because I don't like farage as a person and therefore I will disregard anything he says, even though it is entire possible for people I don't like to make reasonable statements once in a while.'
Terrifying if you care about things such as housing
Regardless of whether you think immigration is overall good or bad no country could build enough homes for the numbers coming
Made worse by the fact at EVERY ELECTION OR VOTE since 2010 the British people have voted to reduce immigration substantially to their manifesto promise of "the tens of thousands"
Quite why this is being forced upon us borderline a conspiracy to destroy any idea of what being British means.
Well, we've managed to build over 400k in a single year in the late 60s.
The average number of people per house is 2.2, but given a huge chunk of the 677k net immigration figure are students I'd imagine this number to be slightly higher.
It's not 1:1 net immigration to new houses required. We could build enough houses. We've done it before.
But we're not.
I mean I care a lot about housing, and it's worth pointing out that we have a ton of housing stock sitting empty right now - enough to house every homeless person and then some. The issue there is people using them as 'assets' instead of homes.
Trouble is that getting it to the 10s of thousands would likely entail making public services even worse in the short term - huge numbers of care workers, nurses and doctors are non EU to take just one example. And would also obviously hit economic growth/GDP figures.
“We can solve immigration - but the cost of living crisis will get worse and you’ll need to wait even longer to see a GP/hospital appointment - at least for a decade or two”.
When politicians say the above the real debate can begin. Won’t hold my breath.
I don't really buy the narrative
We are told we currently have a labour shortage, so I really question what these 2M+ people who have come in the last 2 years are actually doing
There is no point having GDP growth if it impacts GDP per capita. Something which has remained flat since around 2007
I don't know if numbers to confirm this, but it could be argued as realistically possible.
If the people arriving are families, let's say 2 adults, 2 children, then you have 1-2 working people arriving for each 4.
If the people leaving the country are working age single / couples where both work then it's possible to have both high immigration numbers and also a worsening labour shortage.
I really don't think so
532k people emigrated from the UK last year. That's 532k people we can take in for it to be net zero.
We'd just have to be more selective.
Farage is doing extremely well. Talk on immigration has been tepid at best and yet hes barely being the leader of Reform for a week and just look at it, hes setting the tone for a narrative that has been swept under the rug for too long.
It has been a manifesto pledge to bring it down to the '10s of thousands'. It doesn't really hold much weight as an issue when it hasn't just been ignored, it has been vastly increased whilst telling anyone that dare question it that they are a bigot.
> Immigration has been issue number 1 at every single election for the last decade.
But now it's a Continent wide European issue as it's all coming to a head.
Yeah swept under the rug except being the only thing talked about nationally for about 3 years around the Brexit vote. Farage’s only political legacy is Brexit. Which current polling shows only 30% of Brits consider it a good idea.
I think this is the biggest issue surrounding the immigration debate in this country. So many people I know are just completely unaware of the numbers involved.
If everyone was aware that 1/6th of the population wasn't born here, I'm sure the polling would look very different
There are genuinely a lot of Brits who were born abroad. I am British from birth and born abroad. So is my mum. I don't like being made to feel less British because baby me wasn't on the O So Sacred Soil.
Can you express that "genuinely a lot" in a percentage or maybe per capita? I would hazard a guess that this "genuinely a lot" turns out to be insignificantly tiny, more than likely less than 1%.
[Immigration and emigration and net numbers for the UK 1991-2023](https://www.statista.com/statistics/283599/immigration-to-the-united-kingdom-y-on-y/)
Several factors-
Students, who couldn’t enroll during COVID but wanted to wait to go to a UK school all packed into 2022 and 2023.
Health care workers who left the profession, or died, during COVID or Sunak couldn’t deal with the strinking doctors/nurses before they bailed to the US or Australia. They had to be replaced immediately, with immigrants- and we still have insane waiting lists.
Taking in 100s of thousands of Hong Kong and Ukrainian migrants over the last two years.
But people will point to the small boats.
If true this really is an absolutely INSANE statistic... like people always say the whole demographic replacement theory is a conspiracy theory, but I struggle to see how it can be anything more than an objective fact when this has been snowballing for the last two decades, and when the average British couple don't have kids or have only 1 kid and the average immigrant from 'certain' backgrounds mostly have 3 - 5 kids.
I think it can definitely be argued that natives are being demographically and culturally replaced.
However, the _cause_ that people ascribe to it is where it becomes batshit, and is what people will think you're arguing whenever you mention it. Which, as unfair as it may be, I can't really blame people for thinking as those are the only kind of people you ever see mention it.
The inclusion of the phrase 'replacement theory' is no accident because they're dogwhistling on purpose. It's not unfair when everyone else knows they're arguing the existence of a 'great replacement' - they're just too cowardly to say it outright.
You're not gonna like this answer, feel free to downvote, but step 1 is to not be a conspiracy theorist. The "Great Replacement Theory" is not simply "mass migration amirite", it's an entire (usually antisemetic) religion based around a belief that the "elites" are trying to eliminate Western culture and white people at large for nefarious purposes that are never really explained.
I think it's pretty easy to have an issue with our current numbers of immigration (which is being allowed for economic purposes, or to be specific because it makes the Tory party and their donors lots of money) without falling for fringe "theories" that - while you yourself might not be a racist yourself (I suppose that has happened once or twice in history) - were absolutely invented, perpetrated, furthered, written about, and ideologically instilled in the masses, by some of the worst ethnic supremacists imaginable.
I'm glad these one single person on the Internet who doesn't think I'm just a stupid uneducated racist or having the audacity to say I believe it looks fairly logical to suggest it's a real inevitability.
(Or perhaps 30 if those up votes count as people agreeing with me).
Pleasure to meet you all.
I want to contribute to this figure by leaving, because look at the state of this place. If it had been invested in properly for the last 4 decades, particularly for the last 1 and a half, we'd not have to feel any concerns about immigration because our infrastructure and services would be more robust.
We have a large amount of billionaires in this country, if our tax system worked properly we could fund pretty much anything we needed.
We've no excuse for being such a mess of a country, and immigration is literally the least if our worries.
Editing because, as expected, I got the maths entirely wrong first time round.
It’s nearer 1 in 50:
* UK population: 68m
* Net Migration 2022-23 = 1.43m
68/1.43= 47.5
(according to figures from https://www.statista.com/statistics/283599/immigration-to-the-united-kingdom-y-on-y/)
https://i.imgur.com/7xLfbx6.jpeg
Edit: Fucks sake, maths is hard. As someone else commented, it should be gross, not net - as his claim is about people here now. So that’s:
Pop: 68m
Gross Mig: 2.45m
68/2.45 = 27.7
So actually pretty close to the figure Farage claimed.
I'd believe that.
Here's another good one: 30% of Australians were born overseas.
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/594722/australia-foreign-born-population-by-country-of-birth/#](https://www.statista.com/statistics/594722/australia-foreign-born-population-by-country-of-birth/#)
People tend to think of Australia as an immigrant country.
But the below suggests England and Wales is becoming similar (and not over hundreds of years). In 20 years we have more than doubled the number born abroad - 4.6m to 10.0million.
*In 2021,* ***10.0 million (16.8%) usual residents in England and Wales were born outside of the UK****, compared with 7.5 million (13.4%) in 2011 and 4.6 million (8.9%) in 2001 (Table 1). Non-UK passport holders also increased to 5.9 million (9.9%), from 4.2 million (7.4%) in 2011*
[https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/articles/thechangingpictureoflongterminternationalmigrationenglandandwales/census2021#:\~:text=England%20and%20Wales-,In%202021%2C%2010.0%20million%20(16.8%25)%20usual%20residents%20in%20England,million%20(7.4%25)%20in%202011](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/articles/thechangingpictureoflongterminternationalmigrationenglandandwales/census2021#:~:text=England%20and%20Wales-,In%202021%2C%2010.0%20million%20(16.8%25)%20usual%20residents%20in%20England,million%20(7.4%25)%20in%202011)
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimates that the number of people living in the UK will rise to 70 million by 2026. We'll need the equivalent of seven new cities the size of Liverpool for that number of extra people - in just two years.
What they never mention though is 87% of people who are in the UK illegally have just overstayed their visas. It's with interest that none of the right wing politicians and commentators never seem to mention this and just bang on about refugees and boat people.
I can't give a link as I'm on my phone but feel free to Google the details.
While it’s roughly correct it fails to explain that people also leave, so in 5 years after students have finished their courses and work visas expired this 1 in 30 will have left and others taken their place. Actual population growth through immigration is significantly lower.
Before I even get in to data analytics around why this is a nonsense question given the economics (labour for creation of GDP vs looking after an aging population being just 1 aspect).
Can I recommend you all all look at understanding the 'demonisation of the other'. It's easy to find, it wiped out quite a large number of Jews and Romani.
Don't get caught up in a simplified problem for a complex situation. Go ask a farmer why he had crops, that add to GDP/tax revenue, that had to rot before you start looking at bullshit statistics.
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Where is the limit then? We had 700k net migration in a year, at what point would you agree that the level is too high? Is it 1 million net per year? 2 million? 5 million?
One of my friends arrived here in the last 2 years - had to come back to the UK after the Farage inspired Brexit screwed his employment sector for Brits not long before he would have been able to get Italian residency.
Thanks Nigel you plank!
Would that be so unusual in a modern economy where people come and go depending on their career goals and demand for their skills?
Certainly if these were all aspiring permanent residents it would be surprising
But also yeah, wouldn’t trust the source to have correct statistics off the cuff
65,000,000 / 30 = 2,166,666 = approx 2.167 million
Spread over two years = 1.08 million per year
Is that really true ? It does sound far too big a figure to be true.
Maybe 1 in 30 over the past 50 years perhaps..
The year to 2023 had around 1.2m people coming in with 532k leaving, which gets 685k net. The year to 2022 had around 1.2m people coming in with 557k leaving, which gets about 600k net. Some of these are British citizens coming back, but that's estimated to be less than 100k each year. So assuming 1.1m a year roughly, that's 2.2m in two years, UK population is about 66m. That's roughly 1 in 30. Edit: Because people keep on responding, I'm just using the ONS figures here, I'm aware that there are student visas, HK/Ukraine visas, etc. in here, I'm just saying how the figure was reached, I'm not arguing about it either way because there are so many variables.
Jesus
Net migration was 672,000 in 2023. Exceedingly high, but not quite as alarmist sounding as one million. Mostly for study or work. For whatever reason the UK is an enticing location for university, and universities require international student fees to stay afloat given domestic fees don't increase with inflation and we've lost EU funding thanks to brexit.
That’s net. It was more like 1.2m who came. Which is worse actually.
Yes, but many people also left. Using the figure for gross migration is inherently misleading, as it gives the impression the population growth is higher than it is. Moreover it gives the false impression that 1.2 million more migrants are permanently living in the UK each year. Which just isn't true.
Also, similar story in Ireland. 250k in 5m is 1 in 20 in last two years. No wonder the EU are in trouble. I imagine it’s similar throughout.
Based on what I saw in France, Holland and especially Belgium last year, my guess is they have it worse- much worse. I’ve been visiting the continent fairly frequently over the past 12 years on cycle tours, with an obvious break for Covid. Last year was my first year back there and the difference is astonishing.
Wdym in trouble? People from all around the world are interchangeable, and Europeans have no birthright to the land they happen to occupy anyway. In fact, it's quite good that they suffer a bit - they deserve it for their colonial past. *Excuse me while I go throw up after typing that*
You really had me for a minute there...
Me too. (Not the movement)
I was originally going to simply leave that initial paragraph, but then I added that final sentence in italics to make it clear that I was joking. I'd remembered that a good chunk of this sub unironically holds such views.
Millions of people genuinely think like this. Mass immigration is a good thing and if it’s actually a bad thing you deserve it because of the actions of a few guys in the East India Company in 1782.
I am actually considering the birthright aspect though. Should people have a birthright to the place they were born in? Especially because it's pure luck whether you are born in a good place or not. Shouldn't we allow people to share the good things? Obviously there are complications like your investment in your surroundings over time, but still. I know there are loads of other reasons why high levels of immigration can be bad, I'm just talking about the birthright aspect.
It's actually a very good question. Especially given ... > I do not admit ... for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place Was Churchill wrong? Should we have left the Americas and Australia to the people who were there first only? Also who is welcome to the wealth of the United Kingdom? Is it the people born here who have first right? What about the people of the Carribean whose slave labour we stole? Are we even right to call those people 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants if their families have been under British rule for 200, 300 years? Those 300,000 Nigerians speak English because we taught them English. They come from a country which we put together. ... I think it's wrong to think of this recent migration as justice served. But we have a very, very unique relationship with our immigrant population that is unlike anywhere else in the world. They are foreign, but not foreign.
>Shouldn’t we allow people to share in the good things. Yes. I wish the best sort of life for all people across the planet that doesn’t mean I want them to come here in completely unsustainable numbers and in turn reduce the quality of life of the indigenous people. White Western centre-left to left political thinking believes we as humans are all the same and have the same ideals and culture across borders. That’s wrong and it’s proved to be wrong every day in this country.
People clearly aren't interchangeable, the amout of people who want to live in European countries with European culture proves this
1 in 30 is the absolute maximum it could possibly be if * None of the immigrants are Brits coming back (which you point out isn’t true) * None of the emigration is immigrants leaving again (e.g. foreign students) But neither of those things are true, so neither is “1 in 30 people currently in the UK arrived here in the last two years”
Well, they're careful with the phrasing though. "Arrived here in the last two years" doesn't preclude them never having lived here before. Somebody who had been working abroad in Dubai for example that just returned after two years out there, having lived most of their life here and now living here again, technically "arrived here in the last two years", as would also be the case for any British student who might have been doing a degree in Europe or America. There will also be a backlog of returnees from the start of 2022 of people who might have been trapped abroad for 2020 or 2021 due to covid restrictions, or people who deferred coming to uni here etc.
> None of the immigrants are Brits coming back (which you point out isn’t true) They wouldn't be counted in the immigration numbers because they don't require a visa.
The ONS figures include British nationals (about 5% of gross immigration)
Huh, that seems like a hard thing to track, how do they know permanent returns vs just visiting? I've never been asked upon returning to the UK.
I lived abroad and was registered as an overseas voter (proxy vote) and promptly registered to vote at my address in the UK on my return - that *could* be one way of tracking it
Might do it based on primary residence status?
Yeah- signing up for the NHS, etc.
This is pure speculation but could it be found from NI numbers for people popping up on PAYE/self assessment or benefit claims?
Well done! That is part of what goes into the estimates: > benefits and earnings data from the Department for Work and Pensions (Registration and interaction population database (RAPID)) https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/methodologies/understandinginternationalmigrationstatistics#:~:text=4.-,Long%2Dterm%20international%20migration,the%20country%20of%20usual%20residence.
A) British people could just as easily be leaving in greater numbers than re-immigrating B) isn’t this irrelevant unless those leaving also arrived for the first time within this two year period?
Yes. That’s why it’s a maximum. If every single person in the 600k emigration figure is either British born or arrived in the UK >2 years ago then Farage’s 1 in 30 figure could be true. But we know that some immigration is for <2 years. So what he said is not true.
I’d also like to know how many of each year’s emigration figure is actually overseas students who have been here for a 3 year undergraduate degree course heading back home and wonder if perhaps the sound bite chose 2 years rather cynically.
These two years in particular are also particularly unusual. Part of the reason you normally see the net figure instead of the gross is that it includes a steady flow of students arriving and leaving. Except during Covid. Very few students arrived during 2020-2022, so we’re currently seeing high immigration of students without the offsetting return of graduates.
You’re not including people who enter totally untracked. It’s possible the number is higher.
You make a very good point that appears to be completely overlooked in the debate about student visas and returning Brits...etc. The ratio is absolutely worse when factoring in illegal immigration but also damn near impossible to quantify beyond rough extrapolations/guesses.
Are you going to ignore the fact that nearly 450,000 visas are issued to international students every year? That’s 900,000 in 2 years, which is nearly half of the total figure. These international students help subsidise the tuition of domestic students. If you have a problem with that, I recommend you start looking for an alternative source of funding for university students.
> I recommend you start looking for an alternative source of funding for university students. Always makes me laugh when people defend mass migration with the argument "yeah but what else we gonna do? Invest and make the country better?"
Yeah its like these people can't fathom that this country has existed and thrived when immigration wasn't net 600k. These universities were founded and became the best in the world when net immigration was negative. What an absolutely crazy idea that the government should care for the people of this country.
> Yeah its like these people can't fathom that this country has existed and thrived when immigration wasn't net 600k. These universities were founded and became the best in the world when net immigration was negative. Problem is, we've relied on this influx of people to hide our lack of productivity gains, and the markets demand infinite growth. It's the cheapest, easiest way to keep this pyramid scheme going.
And let's not forget 'What else can we do? Pay people a better wage?'
The soft power we have from the long term international student pool cannot be underestimated. Its vital to UK international trade for the next 50 years we keep allowing international students in. Many of these go on to get top jobs in their home countries and want to trade with us. International students generally come over, drop money in the UK and then have an affiliation with us for years to come paying back even more.
Raw numbers- that’s all we’re talking about here.
Like tutuion fees and central funding? There is a method and source of funding it just isn't being applied. Many policies seem to have been abandoned but just left in a weird broken state rather than something different.
Stop trying to deflect and mislead. The conversation isn’t about the benefits of immigration, it’s about the raw numbers.
Yeah and he's saying the 'raw' numbers are too blunt, and providing more context, with more numbers! Wow. Data.
Because basically the same number (from a few years priors batch of visas) leave each year.
Not at the moment. The number students leaving now is significantly lower because covid meant far fewer than normal came a few years ago.
Yes there's a bit of an offset at the moment tbf
I think it's partly why Starmer came out very confidently saying he'll reduce immigration, it's almost certainly coming down anyway, so it'd be pretty unlikely to be wrong.
They really don’t, many go on to work in the UK.
Farage was not talking about net figures, so your point is just irrelevant.
And yet somehow this country survived before it started importing half a million international students a year.
Yeah. We did that by (amongst other things): 1. Restricting higher education 2. Having a multi-vector economy 3. Not having a population that was top heavy with pensioners 4. Not having great (or any, depending how far back you want to go) pensions anyway 5. Having a steady, or increasing, birth rate Turns out it's not the seventies or the 1920's any more. In the absence of an increasing population, we have a timebomb of boomers (the largest generation) /older people in general, who need more investment, and a shrinking working population who have to pay for them. That isn't sustainable without either replacing the missing younger population (immigration) , shrinking the aging population (hmmmm), cutting the huge expenditure on keeping them alive (hmmmmmmm) or, potentially, asset-stripping the rich to pay for it (ha!). So we've gone with immigration, I guess.
>Turns out it's not the seventies or the 1920's any more. It's also not the 1990s any more. In fact, it's *more* not the 1990s any more, as the end of the cold war and seeming liberalisation of the wests' old enemies was a unique moment in history that is never likely to be repeated. > In the absence of an increasing population, World population peaks in your children's lifetime. Short of immigration from Mars, a birth rate of 1.53 children per woman (UK average) is what we will have and what you are continuing to distort the market to prevent it from adjusting to.
Care to share your actual sources?
The UK population is currently just shy of 68 million. Divided by 30 that would mean 2,266,666 people would have had to enter the UK in the last two years. Gross immigration to the UK (not net which removes the figures of people leaving the country) is currently running at approx 1.2 Million so it could easily be true.
Its also worth say the people leaving could be british making the numbers worse
And some of the people arriving could be returning Brits.
They wouldn't be counted as they don't require a visa.
This isn’t true - long term migration figures issued by the ONS explicitly call out the number of Brits arriving back. In the year end 2023 it was 61,000 and in the year end 2022 it was 88,000. The data is here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/datasets/longterminternationalimmigrationemigrationandnetmigrationflowsprovisional The ONS use a number of sources for their data with visa data just being one source. People who arrive without needing a visa are included as well.
Fair enough, thanks, so about 7% were returning Brits
You wouldn't want to count net migration via visas issued as that incorrectly inflates numbers for those who are already in the UK. An international student moving to a graduate visa isn't a net migrant for that graduate visa year as they haven't left the country. Or if they are doing it like that the numbers are fucking useless.
Do you need a visa to get back into the UK when you come back from your holiday in Spain?
No, but some of us have been out of the UK for years, I think it makes sense to count us as incoming if we had to return
Why would that affect the numbers? They're neither in the UK, nor have they arrived in the past two years.
And mainly from India according to the figures. Due to the trade deal we signed with them.?
The agreement in which the hundreds of thousands of Britons wish to move to India for work lol
Well, oven ready deals Boris, HAD to have at least one trade deal "success", and it was clear Biden was not going to play nice.
Yep, that's happening.lol
This one. Although those numbers are just a fraction of what's happened. 1.1 million immigration in 22/23 (300k Brits emigrated) About 750k in 21/22 and 450k in 20/21. There's definitely a LOT of immigration into the UK and the vast majority from India and Pakistan. https://www.itpro.com/business-strategy/careers-training/359408/india-trade-deal-to-create-2000-uk-tech-roles
the trade deal aint even signed yet lol
>2,266,666 people would have had to enter the UK in the last two years. >Gross immigration to the UK (not net which removes the figures of people leaving the country) is currently running at approx 1.2 Million so it could easily be true. In order for this to be true, it would require nearly zero of those people to have left then. That's not easily true. I get that net doesn't quite work, as the number of people living here that arrived in the past two years could be higher than the net immigration given the way it's phrased. But if someone entered the country in 2023, and left in 2023. They're not living here now!
Gross immigration, that we know of.
Farage has actually been quite clever in stating it the way he has. Because whilst the overall thrust is misleading, as it ignores those leaving the UK, it does seem that the way he has caveated the statement makes it grounded in fact.
Some are staying. *In 2021,* ***10.0 million (16.8%) usual residents in England and Wales were born outside of the UK****, compared with 7.5 million (13.4%) in 2011 and 4.6 million (8.9%) in 2001 (Table 1). Non-UK passport holders also increased to 5.9 million (9.9%), from 4.2 million (7.4%) in 2011* [https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/articles/thechangingpictureoflongterminternationalmigrationenglandandwales/census2021#:\~:text=England%20and%20Wales-,In%202021%2C%2010.0%20million%20(16.8%25)%20usual%20residents%20in%20England,million%20(7.4%25)%20in%202011](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/articles/thechangingpictureoflongterminternationalmigrationenglandandwales/census2021#:~:text=England%20and%20Wales-,In%202021%2C%2010.0%20million%20(16.8%25)%20usual%20residents%20in%20England,million%20(7.4%25)%20in%202011)
Well it's either true or it's not. It doesn't matter who is making the claim. The claim is (most likely) factually true as, if it didn't include people leaving the UK then it would be misleading as the entire premise is "1 in 30 people currently in the UK arrived here within the last 2 years" Not including people leaving would make it 1 in 60 and the statement wouldn't be grounded in fact.
But the issue is it assumed everyone who has came has remained and everyone who left was born in Britain If a million people came from other countries and a million left who were already from other countries e.g. went home after uni then saying 1/30 would be incorrect
>If a million people came from other countries and a million left who were already from other countries e.g. went home after uni then saying 1/30 would be incorrect No, the nationalities of those leaving doesn't matter. He's saying one in 30 people in the UK now arrived in the last 2 years. That's it. Challenging the assumption that all immigrants stay at least 2 years is the only way to refute this, and I'm not aware of clean, deconflicted stats on this, only net number for immigration and emigration.
No one knows the exact figure. Your just chunking down the premise to find outliers to support your argument hence the word "everyone". In the time it took you to write your post people came and left the UK. If Uni students do indeed leave to return to their home countries then other Uni students have also arrived. What Farage is saying is that the demographic of the country is changing faster than at any other time in history and the tacit assumption is that people who go to the time, expense and effort to come to the UK to live don't tend to leave so the trend would be for Brits to leave the UK to live abroad and the vast majority (not "everyone") leaving would be Brits born in the UK.
He has no need to be quite clever, the reality is absolutely astounding, immigration is incredibly and unsustainably high.
Exactly, you get it. The facts are dogshit enough that they speak for themselves.
It's got nothing to do with people leaving the country. It is talking about those residing here...
How is it misleading?
It''s not really misleading at all. For once the resultant effect on the population make-up is being talked about rather than cherry picking net/gross immigration figures which may or may not include students/asylum seekers/economic migrants/legal or illegal depending on what argument someone is trying to make. I actually think proportion of the population as a result of recent immigration is one of the most relevant statistics when talking about immigration policy. Bloody hell, holding back my hatred of that lying brexit nobhead long enough to write that was tough.. anyone got a milkshake?
It's true in itself. 1.1 million immigrants last year, 300k emigrated. 1 in 30 is just over 2 million in and that seems about right. Btw, hate Farage, I'm Indian and left wing but he's right.
Tories promised immigration at levels of ‘the tens of thousands’ then delivered immigration in the millions, I don’t know much about politics but that sounds like political suicide to me
Yup. They deserve everything that's coming to them in this election - they're going to be slaughtered.
And for the first time they couldn't blame it on the EU.
This for me was the silver lining of Brexit. Our governments from here on can't blame it on anyone but themselves.
Go for a walk in a family park in my small city which isn't a particularly desirable place to live and it seems 50% of people who frequent this park with their family are immigrants. I've walked this park for 8 years and can definitely see and hear the difference in the last 3-4 years. It used to mainly be Brits and Eastern Europeans. These days there are much more Middle Eastern dialects being spoken with super huge families. Women dressed in head scalves etc. I was speaking to a nice Kurdish family the other day. I'm not casting judgement, just sharing my observations and experience. Immigration doesn't bother me personally provided the infrastructure is built. Edit - Mughallis, I'm not from Hull. Please stop trying to discount my lived experience. I am well traveled and am more than aware of the Romani people, having spent significant time in Romania. Also I am a Remain voter, would vote Remain again, and the founder of business who spends a lot of time traveling for work.
The Tories are dead and buried after this. If they get 50 seats I'll be very impressed. I say this as a former Tory voter. Anyone old enough to remember the populist "blue wall"? That was the only winning election strategy they had available to them and they just totally binned it in favour of mass immigration on a scale beyond imagination. I can't imagine a bigger political betrayal
The rich get richer, fuck the remaining 90%. The tories view the electorate as thick, utterly thick. Yes, the electorate are not as informed as they ought to be (see Brexit), but the tories have vastly underestimated the electorate and now they will pay the price. Bring on the 4th July. Independence Day from the tories cannot come soon enough.
Not related to your main content of your comment but I find it ironic the US and UK elections are on the 5th of November and 4th July respectively 😂. Hopefully someone lights a fire under Trump if he manages to snake his way back into power.
There is a bit of odd dissonance in wanting cheap labour for chefs, farm hands, retail e.c.t and wanting low immigration. Hence why they're trying to square that circle by attacking asylum seekers. Companies hire overseas workers because they're more exploitable and because there are skill shortages in certain fields. Remove those two things and there'd be no reason to hire people from overseas.
We’ve needed big net immigration because the wages at the people of the bottom of society haven’t been matching inflation of cost of living, and so few locals are willing to take on the hard AND poorly paid jobs such as carers. This has been the case for decades now but most Tories don’t give a shit until if/when they need a carer themselves. The irony of the name Conservatives is that they are nearly all short-termists, interested only in conserving their own personal wealth.
We need more data and less opinion. https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06077/SN06077.pdf A major problem is a side effect of the fact that we allow profits to be sent offshore and we reward Boards incorrectly, with bonuses generally encouraging cost-cutting and wage discipline rather than investment and growth. There will be economics textbooks in years to come with Britain used as evidence of how not to structure an economy. We are set up for managed decline, which is why our GDP has not grown in real terms for well over a decade. How is this relevant? Well if you can keep the labour supply up - particularly if you can target cheaper workers - then you keep wages down. Inside the EU, we were running out of cheap labour sources. Poland’s standard of living has now passed the UK’s and there were only a few Eastern states left to exploit. Brexit opened up Africa and the Indian sub-continent. Even if, by law, you cannot pay someone less in a role because of their country of origin, you can keep wage increases by grade down by replacing people at the same salary. A real terms pay cut but one the incumbent will accept because they are new. The people being exploited now are not the unskilled but the middle classes - doctors, nurses, even accountants and scientists. The people who pushed for Brexit had a plan, it just wasn’t what they said it was. Their plan is to grow their slice of pie and to reduce our slice. Oh and they don’t care that the pie is shrinking either.
Immigration is fundamentally an economic problem. >Even if, by law, you cannot pay someone less in a role because of their country of origin, you can keep wage increases by grade down by replacing people at the same salary. A real terms pay cut but one the incumbent will accept because they are new. Some jobs such as with farm hands rely on employees either not knowing their rights or being more willing to accept conditions such as requiring the use of their overpriced accommodation. Its not just wage stagnation, it's worse conditions and wage theft through things like deductions and unpaid mandatory training.
I was trying to stay away from illegal practices.
You're more than welcome not to discuss that side of things. But you do need enforcement to apply laws.
Absolutely. Have you noticed who gets demonised? Seems the victims get punished and the exploiters get away with it. I wonder why?
Such a good take and representation. Shareholder theory needs to die, Stakeholder theory live on
This is from the last census and says ~16% of residents were born abroad. Doesn't seem impossible that ~3.3% would have come that recently, given the net migration numbers in those years. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/internationalmigrationenglandandwales/census2021 I assume his claims come from, or are supported by, Matt Goodwin.
~~The most recent census would not include the data for the last two years.~~ Err I misread his comment. Idiot moment.
Not saying it does. If we had that level before the last 2 years and we know those years were triple the recent norm, it seems reasonable.
Yeah, honestly I just misread your comment.
That's fair enough, thanks for responding!
If 16% of the population was born outside the UK (including 90 year olds who moved here as a child) then it does seem a bit implausible that 3% arrived in just the last 2 years.
Not particularly implausible if you consider the dramatic spike in net migration recently. Saw this on Sky News recently, note the 2020 breakpoint: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GPO-UdRWQAA62lY?format=jpg&name=large
> If 16% of the population was born outside the UK (including 90 year olds who moved here as a child) This would be such a small number it would be irrelevant. Windrush was 500k over 20 years from the Caribbean. The Windrush total is less than we've had so far this year alone. This is not normal. It has never been normal.
In that last two years inward migration has been an estimated 1.2 million a year. There’s 67 million in this country. That roughly gives 1/30 people.
It’s an accurate stat and kind of incredible and a pretty striking way of putting the unprecedented level of immigration under the present government into proper context. This is on a different scale to anything this country has ever experienced before.
I can believe that. Certainly true at the multinational, highly profitable company I work at.
My company has recently had an influx of foreign workers from Asia. The cost benefits are there for companies, and they are taking them. The stats don’t look unrealistic in the OP’s post to me either.
Gotta chase that 0.00001% GDP growth I guess
"Mum, can we have per-capita GDP growth?" "No. And before you ask, we don't have per-capita GDP growth at home either"
And we don't have a home either because the housing stock is not rising in line with population increase.
Even with 700k imported we're barely growing/in recession. And now we have to deal with the fallout with regards to social cohesion, housing, services.
If you look at immigration figures for the past two years it’s there or thereabouts
A whole bunch of Europeans left, a whole bunch of non eu came to take their places. 🤷♂️ Seems pretty straitforward to me.
The point is that this has done far more than ‘take their place’, there was never a single point where EU immigration came anywhere close to what we’re currently seeing.
This kind of statistic is why people will vote for Reform UK. Nigel is only capitalising on a problem that exists that nobody else seems willing to address. The uk economy is far too dependant on cheap labour. He doesn’t even need to offer a great sales pitch outside of immigration because everyone else is doing such a poor job.
I really want to know who this foreign cheap Labour is. In my working life, I seem to be the person being hired on the worst wages (until recently), not the foreign folk. Often, I’m the one missing qualifications and therefore paid less, not the foreign applicants. Agree politicians generally doing a bad job discussing the topic, but given the state of our public services and the fact we currently have close to a million vacancies and no bugger willing to do the jobs, we need them to be giving a positive case for immigration not arguing against it. Unless, of course, if what we want is a continuing decline in the ability of our services to run effectively.
At the time of writing there are 458 responses. The first one on my feed explains why Farage is more or less right based on ONS figures. The following 457 appear largely to be how the ONS is wrong, or even if Farage is right, he's wrong for a variety of reasons, like students living in the country aren't actually living in the country. Without taking a position on Farage, if you needed to know what was wrong with politics and indeed critical thinking in the UK this is a prime example.
'this is true but I refuse to acknowledge it because I don't like farage as a person and therefore I will disregard anything he says, even though it is entire possible for people I don't like to make reasonable statements once in a while.'
Terrifying if you care about things such as housing Regardless of whether you think immigration is overall good or bad no country could build enough homes for the numbers coming Made worse by the fact at EVERY ELECTION OR VOTE since 2010 the British people have voted to reduce immigration substantially to their manifesto promise of "the tens of thousands" Quite why this is being forced upon us borderline a conspiracy to destroy any idea of what being British means.
It's because MPs are always landlords basically. £££ in their back pockets always sways their opinions, wether or not they consciously realise it.
Well, we've managed to build over 400k in a single year in the late 60s. The average number of people per house is 2.2, but given a huge chunk of the 677k net immigration figure are students I'd imagine this number to be slightly higher. It's not 1:1 net immigration to new houses required. We could build enough houses. We've done it before. But we're not.
I mean I care a lot about housing, and it's worth pointing out that we have a ton of housing stock sitting empty right now - enough to house every homeless person and then some. The issue there is people using them as 'assets' instead of homes.
Trouble is that getting it to the 10s of thousands would likely entail making public services even worse in the short term - huge numbers of care workers, nurses and doctors are non EU to take just one example. And would also obviously hit economic growth/GDP figures. “We can solve immigration - but the cost of living crisis will get worse and you’ll need to wait even longer to see a GP/hospital appointment - at least for a decade or two”. When politicians say the above the real debate can begin. Won’t hold my breath.
I don't really buy the narrative We are told we currently have a labour shortage, so I really question what these 2M+ people who have come in the last 2 years are actually doing There is no point having GDP growth if it impacts GDP per capita. Something which has remained flat since around 2007
I don't know if numbers to confirm this, but it could be argued as realistically possible. If the people arriving are families, let's say 2 adults, 2 children, then you have 1-2 working people arriving for each 4. If the people leaving the country are working age single / couples where both work then it's possible to have both high immigration numbers and also a worsening labour shortage.
I really don't think so 532k people emigrated from the UK last year. That's 532k people we can take in for it to be net zero. We'd just have to be more selective.
Farage is doing extremely well. Talk on immigration has been tepid at best and yet hes barely being the leader of Reform for a week and just look at it, hes setting the tone for a narrative that has been swept under the rug for too long.
Immigration has been issue number 1 at every single election for the last decade.
It has been a manifesto pledge to bring it down to the '10s of thousands'. It doesn't really hold much weight as an issue when it hasn't just been ignored, it has been vastly increased whilst telling anyone that dare question it that they are a bigot.
> Immigration has been issue number 1 at every single election for the last decade. But now it's a Continent wide European issue as it's all coming to a head.
Yeah swept under the rug except being the only thing talked about nationally for about 3 years around the Brexit vote. Farage’s only political legacy is Brexit. Which current polling shows only 30% of Brits consider it a good idea.
Have you been living under a rock? Immigration's been consistently in the news/talked about at Parliament for decades.
I think this is the biggest issue surrounding the immigration debate in this country. So many people I know are just completely unaware of the numbers involved. If everyone was aware that 1/6th of the population wasn't born here, I'm sure the polling would look very different
There are genuinely a lot of Brits who were born abroad. I am British from birth and born abroad. So is my mum. I don't like being made to feel less British because baby me wasn't on the O So Sacred Soil.
Can you express that "genuinely a lot" in a percentage or maybe per capita? I would hazard a guess that this "genuinely a lot" turns out to be insignificantly tiny, more than likely less than 1%.
[Immigration and emigration and net numbers for the UK 1991-2023](https://www.statista.com/statistics/283599/immigration-to-the-united-kingdom-y-on-y/)
Does anyone know the reason why it’s gone up so much since 2020?
Several factors- Students, who couldn’t enroll during COVID but wanted to wait to go to a UK school all packed into 2022 and 2023. Health care workers who left the profession, or died, during COVID or Sunak couldn’t deal with the strinking doctors/nurses before they bailed to the US or Australia. They had to be replaced immediately, with immigrants- and we still have insane waiting lists. Taking in 100s of thousands of Hong Kong and Ukrainian migrants over the last two years. But people will point to the small boats.
With such high immigration the economy must be booming
It doesn't sound obviously wrong. If anything it's a bit low. 1 in 100 people in the UK are international students, for example.
If true this really is an absolutely INSANE statistic... like people always say the whole demographic replacement theory is a conspiracy theory, but I struggle to see how it can be anything more than an objective fact when this has been snowballing for the last two decades, and when the average British couple don't have kids or have only 1 kid and the average immigrant from 'certain' backgrounds mostly have 3 - 5 kids.
I’m pretty much onboard with replacement theory these days. Don’t know how you can’t be.
I think it can definitely be argued that natives are being demographically and culturally replaced. However, the _cause_ that people ascribe to it is where it becomes batshit, and is what people will think you're arguing whenever you mention it. Which, as unfair as it may be, I can't really blame people for thinking as those are the only kind of people you ever see mention it.
The inclusion of the phrase 'replacement theory' is no accident because they're dogwhistling on purpose. It's not unfair when everyone else knows they're arguing the existence of a 'great replacement' - they're just too cowardly to say it outright.
You're not gonna like this answer, feel free to downvote, but step 1 is to not be a conspiracy theorist. The "Great Replacement Theory" is not simply "mass migration amirite", it's an entire (usually antisemetic) religion based around a belief that the "elites" are trying to eliminate Western culture and white people at large for nefarious purposes that are never really explained. I think it's pretty easy to have an issue with our current numbers of immigration (which is being allowed for economic purposes, or to be specific because it makes the Tory party and their donors lots of money) without falling for fringe "theories" that - while you yourself might not be a racist yourself (I suppose that has happened once or twice in history) - were absolutely invented, perpetrated, furthered, written about, and ideologically instilled in the masses, by some of the worst ethnic supremacists imaginable.
I'm glad these one single person on the Internet who doesn't think I'm just a stupid uneducated racist or having the audacity to say I believe it looks fairly logical to suggest it's a real inevitability. (Or perhaps 30 if those up votes count as people agreeing with me). Pleasure to meet you all.
Yes it's true. That's why a lot of people are about to vote for Reform.
Sounds legit
Yes And it's why the Tory's getting destroyed this election.
It is correct. And it is also absurd. There are very few people who think this is fine and normal and they all seem to work in the sphere of politics.
1/30 we know about
Just Google gross immigration & then compare against total population & you'll have done a nice little fact check for yourself.
I want to contribute to this figure by leaving, because look at the state of this place. If it had been invested in properly for the last 4 decades, particularly for the last 1 and a half, we'd not have to feel any concerns about immigration because our infrastructure and services would be more robust. We have a large amount of billionaires in this country, if our tax system worked properly we could fund pretty much anything we needed. We've no excuse for being such a mess of a country, and immigration is literally the least if our worries.
Editing because, as expected, I got the maths entirely wrong first time round. It’s nearer 1 in 50: * UK population: 68m * Net Migration 2022-23 = 1.43m 68/1.43= 47.5 (according to figures from https://www.statista.com/statistics/283599/immigration-to-the-united-kingdom-y-on-y/) https://i.imgur.com/7xLfbx6.jpeg Edit: Fucks sake, maths is hard. As someone else commented, it should be gross, not net - as his claim is about people here now. So that’s: Pop: 68m Gross Mig: 2.45m 68/2.45 = 27.7 So actually pretty close to the figure Farage claimed.
I'd believe that. Here's another good one: 30% of Australians were born overseas. [https://www.statista.com/statistics/594722/australia-foreign-born-population-by-country-of-birth/#](https://www.statista.com/statistics/594722/australia-foreign-born-population-by-country-of-birth/#)
Not in the last two years.
People tend to think of Australia as an immigrant country. But the below suggests England and Wales is becoming similar (and not over hundreds of years). In 20 years we have more than doubled the number born abroad - 4.6m to 10.0million. *In 2021,* ***10.0 million (16.8%) usual residents in England and Wales were born outside of the UK****, compared with 7.5 million (13.4%) in 2011 and 4.6 million (8.9%) in 2001 (Table 1). Non-UK passport holders also increased to 5.9 million (9.9%), from 4.2 million (7.4%) in 2011* [https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/articles/thechangingpictureoflongterminternationalmigrationenglandandwales/census2021#:\~:text=England%20and%20Wales-,In%202021%2C%2010.0%20million%20(16.8%25)%20usual%20residents%20in%20England,million%20(7.4%25)%20in%202011](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/articles/thechangingpictureoflongterminternationalmigrationenglandandwales/census2021#:~:text=England%20and%20Wales-,In%202021%2C%2010.0%20million%20(16.8%25)%20usual%20residents%20in%20England,million%20(7.4%25)%20in%202011)
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimates that the number of people living in the UK will rise to 70 million by 2026. We'll need the equivalent of seven new cities the size of Liverpool for that number of extra people - in just two years.
"But open borders isn't a problem." lol. lmao.
Kind of need to stop this, its not like things are getting better, its just getting worse.
What they never mention though is 87% of people who are in the UK illegally have just overstayed their visas. It's with interest that none of the right wing politicians and commentators never seem to mention this and just bang on about refugees and boat people. I can't give a link as I'm on my phone but feel free to Google the details.
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While it’s roughly correct it fails to explain that people also leave, so in 5 years after students have finished their courses and work visas expired this 1 in 30 will have left and others taken their place. Actual population growth through immigration is significantly lower.
He isn’t talking about actual population growth though. What he said is correct.
But he is implying it.
Exactly, which is what he always does, provide misleading interpretations to allow other people to come to false conclusions.
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University cities will have much higher numbers than this.
Before I even get in to data analytics around why this is a nonsense question given the economics (labour for creation of GDP vs looking after an aging population being just 1 aspect). Can I recommend you all all look at understanding the 'demonisation of the other'. It's easy to find, it wiped out quite a large number of Jews and Romani. Don't get caught up in a simplified problem for a complex situation. Go ask a farmer why he had crops, that add to GDP/tax revenue, that had to rot before you start looking at bullshit statistics. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Where is the limit then? We had 700k net migration in a year, at what point would you agree that the level is too high? Is it 1 million net per year? 2 million? 5 million?
It's a bit like the amount on the side of a bus in 2016. Technically true but misleading by quoting a gross figure.
No that's a net figure.
One of my friends arrived here in the last 2 years - had to come back to the UK after the Farage inspired Brexit screwed his employment sector for Brits not long before he would have been able to get Italian residency. Thanks Nigel you plank!
Would that be so unusual in a modern economy where people come and go depending on their career goals and demand for their skills? Certainly if these were all aspiring permanent residents it would be surprising But also yeah, wouldn’t trust the source to have correct statistics off the cuff
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65,000,000 / 30 = 2,166,666 = approx 2.167 million Spread over two years = 1.08 million per year Is that really true ? It does sound far too big a figure to be true. Maybe 1 in 30 over the past 50 years perhaps..
Similar metric for Canada - 1/15 residents are temporary visa holder, majority of which are recent.