By Yash Dubal

Early this month, the UK parliament returned after the summer break to expect British MPs to dust off their rhetorical weapons and armour ready for battle to the end. For the next 15 months, Britain’s political parties will be in general election mode.

The last election on December 12, 2019, saw a landslide victory for the Conservative Party led by Boris Johnson, who became Prime Minister. Much has changed since then. Rishi Sunak is now Prime Minister and the Conservative Party is deeply unpopular. Polls suggest it will not win the election, but under electoral rules, elections must be held before the end of 2024. Instead, the Labour Party is favourite to win.

One issue the Conservatives are using to try and win support is immigration. Last year, net migration to the UK reached 606,000. A record. This was not what many Conservative voters had been sold when they voted to ‘take back control’ of UK borders and leave the European Union. The 2019 Conservative Party manifesto included a pledge to reduce migration to below 250,000. Previous administrations had promised to bring it down to the tens of thousands.

Britain has always had a complicated relationship with immigration. Britain is a welcoming country for as long as migrants arrive in a trickle and if they are the right kind of migrant. Many Brits, however, feel the country is being overrun.

So, with an election looming and voters to please, Rishi Sunak, the son of Indian migrants, has doubled down and promised to get net migration to around 250,000 a year. Quite how this will be done is anyone’s guess, given that the UK has a liberal immigration policy that allows easy access to work visas for those with the right skills.

Currently, the UK Home Office, the department of government in charge of immigration, is cracking down on illegal workers with increased raids and compliance visits. If it were a dog, it would bark, but not necessarily bite. Nevertheless, it serves to stoke anti-immigration feelings and positions the Conservatives as the party dealing with the ‘problem’.

But is it really a problem? Interestingly, a new piece of research released earlier in the summer showed that British concerns over immigration figures are misplaced and that levels of net migration in the UK remain broadly similar to other high-income countries. A briefing by The Migration Observatory, a think tank based at the University of Oxford, found that the percentage of foreign-born people in the UK was the same as in the US and Spain and less than Germany, Belgium, Ireland and Australia.

The figures contradict current government messaging and policy, which asserts that immigration is too high and needs to be reduced, said experts.

The report confirmed that the 2022 rise in net migration was an anomaly caused mainly by global circumstances. For example, there were 114,000 long-term arrivals to the UK from Ukraine and 52,000 long-term arrivals from Hong Kong.

The report suggested that the British political tendency to focus on net migration figures is misleading as the metric has many flaws and can produce counterintuitive or misleading figures. Indeed, the UK is unusual in its choice to use net migration in policy debates as the main measure for discussing migration levels. The percentage rate of foreign-born people in a population is accepted as a more reliable indicator of how much immigration a country has experienced.

The report concluded that the 2022 figure does not represent the ‘new normal’ and predicted that figures will fall from this year onwards.

The report shows that there is no need for the British public to panic or get hysterical over the figures for legal migration. While it might be convenient for politicians to scare people in an election year with the suggestion immigration is at rampant levels, the report shows the opposite.

(Author is Director & a Senior Immigration Associate at A Y & J Solicitors, London, United Kingdom; Views expressed are his own.)