To say that that many Britons are unhappy with the scale of immigration into their country is an understatement.
To say that that many Britons are unhappy with the scale of immigration into their country is an understatement. Not traditionally a country of mass immigration, the U.K. has seen a change over the postwar decades that has, to use a neutral term, been astonishing. At best, British voters acquiesced. The increase reached some sort of peak (so far) in a massive surge of arrivals in the early 2020s, the so-called “Boriswave,” under Boris Johnson, a nominally Conservative prime minister.
I wrote a bit about this fiasco (too weak a word) last year:
Although the Brexit referendum was decided narrowly, polls indicated that, once the vote had been taken, there was a solid majority for a narrow Brexit. This would extricate the country from the EU’s state-building process (“ever closer union”) while retaining a close trading relationship by, say perhaps, remaining a member of European Free Trade Association, within the European Economic Area (the single market) via something akin to the “Norway option.” May and Johnson resisted efforts to go down this route on the grounds that Brexit voters had rejected the EU’s “freedom of movement.” But they did so without thinking through the implications for an economy that, despite worrying levels of structural (if often concealed) unemployment, had become unhealthily dependent on cheap migrant labor.
The answer, in theory, was to wean Britain off that model by adopting an approach designed to bring its people back into the workforce (higher wages are good!) while allowing a certain degree of skilled migration, measured by a points system. And that, indeed, was what was adopted during Boris Johnson’s time as prime minister, in theory…
That’s not what happened.
Writing for CapX last month, Karl Williams once again ran through the numbers:
In 2022 we saw the fastest rate of population growth since 1828, and in each of 2022, 2023 and 2024, the population increased in absolute terms by more than any other year on record. Immigration drove over 99% of the increase.
Moreover, once you account for net emigration of over 500,000 British nationals (including both UK-born and naturalised citizens), net migration of non-UK citizens was 3.2 million people over 2021-25 – about 4.8% of the pre-Boriswave population.
In other words, almost 1 in 20 people resident in Britain today arrived in just the last five years…
Williams reckons that about one in five people currently living in the U.K. are foreign-born, up from one in twelve at the turn of the century.
The Labour government (which manages to be both newish and senescent) has been busily talking up the reduction in net migration. This is indeed down a long way, to some 171,000 last year, but the gross figure is still very high (813,000). The U.K. population is now just under 70 million, 10 million more than in 2000.
As Williams explains, whether consciously or consciously, people don’t just look at the numbers of immigrants coming in (“the flow”), they also see the numbers who have already arrived (“the stock”). He refers to recent polling: Forty-seven percent of respondents said that immigration had been “mostly bad” for the country over the last ten years. Twenty percent thought that it had been “mostly good.”
That’s just one of the reasons that the British government is working so hard to ratchet up online censorship.
Where this is going politically is anyone’s guess. Nowhere good, I suspect.
Speaking of which, German-born economist Robin Brooks notes that support for the AfD, the country’s “far right” party (I’ll use that much abused term; it is certainly merited for some elements within the AfD) is continuing to rise. He worries about what might happen were the AfD to come to power, primarily (at least in this article) with regard to its stance on defense (the party looks on Moscow with far too friendly an eye) and the euro (for which the AfD is, correctly, no enthusiast).
The AfD is unlikely to be running things at the federal level any time soon, but its rise has left Germany’s center-right Chancellor Merz caught between a Brandmauer (the “firewall” designed to block any sort of cooperation with the AfD) and a hard place (his ill-matched coalition with the center-left SPD).
And what is fueling the AfD’s continued ascent?
Brooks:
The single most important question is what’s driving rising AfD popularity. Maybe Germany’s decade-long economic slump or the “Grand Coalition” of the CDU and SPD play a role, but they’re not the main driver. Instead, the main driver in my view is deep dissatisfaction among voters over immigration. When I make this point to folks, they usually push back, saying immigration is down a lot from just a few years ago. That’s true, but immigration is a stock and a flow issue. Even if you take the “flow” of new immigrants down to zero, that still leaves the cumulative effects of past immigration flows in the form of a large, foreign-born population. It’s this “stock” that voters see and this is what in my view is fueling the rapid rise of the AfD.
That sounds familiar, and so does Germany’s ever-increasing fondness for online censorship.