Curbing illegal immigration is a stated priority of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Interior Minister Suella Braverman. The latter defended in March before parliament its plan to fight against clandestine crossings in the Channel: rapid expulsion of undocumented migrants, prohibition for them to file an application for asylum or to subsequently apply for British nationality. At the same time, Rishi Sunak promised to pay half a billion euros to France to hinder the action of the smugglers, and is now continuing its bilateral partnerships with the Italy of Giorgia Meloni. And yet… in a column published in the Times, the director of the Center for Policy Studies (a liberal and conservative think-tank, formerly headed by Margaret Thatcher) defiantly considers that this “Stop the boats” policy is not the most urgent.
What Robert Colvile underlines in this op-ed published on Sunday April 29 is that illegal immigration, which certainly reaches spectacular proportions, would almost make us forget another reality, even more massive: that of legal immigration which reaches levels records, and is about to cross a historic threshold. According to calculations by the Center for Policy Studies, the net migratory balance could exceed 700,000 people in 2022. This is the subtraction made between the number of entries into the territory (visas granted by the authorities) and the number of long-term departures. In November, the British National Statistics Office revealed that this net immigration amounted to 504,000 people between June 2021 and June 2022: this was already an unprecedented record.
If the Ministry of the Interior has not yet published the figures for the whole of 2022 (this communication will be made on May 25), Robert Colvile’s estimate takes into account the number of visas granted in 2022: more than 1.3 million, again a record number. From which he subtracts a presumed stable number of departures from the United Kingdom, around 500,000 people, or even less, he estimates: there is no reason for this statistic to be out of the usual curves, and the number of departures rather tends to drop after being very high due to Brexit.
It is therefore the considerable increase in the number of immigrants arriving legally in the United Kingdom that is reflected in this estimate of a record net migration. Arrivals have been driven up by several factors: on the one hand, of course, the granting of 210,000 visas to Ukrainian refugees – but even if we exclude the share represented by Ukrainian immigration , the figures would probably still break a record, notes Robert Colvile. On the other hand, while intra-European immigration remains at a stable level, it is the number of study or work visas granted to people from outside Europe that has also jumped. Student immigration and labor immigration: 200,000 more people would have entered the UK in 2022 than in 2021, in each of these two categories, notes the Center for Policy Studies. Some countries in particular feed these flows: “Since 2019, work visas granted to Indians have doubled, and student visas have quadrupled”, notes Robert Colvile. Between the beginning of 2021 and the end of 2022, the number of foreign workers in the country increased from 2 to 3 million.
Results that are decisive, however, observes Robert Colvile, with the will displayed by the leaders of the Tories to stop the progression of legal immigration to the United Kingdom, which according to him weakens a healthcare system and a social policy already in tension. “Either way, voters are facing the reverse of what they were promised. David Cameron pledged to cut legal immigration by the tens of thousands. The campaign for Brexit was backed by a promise to regain control of immigration, and its supporters brandished the threat of an uncontrolled continuation of immigration in the event of remaining in the EU,” writes Robert Colvile.
