![]() The opposition Labour Party was quick to criticize Sunak’s government over Thursday’s numbers. ![]() “The idea that the UK would be better off if we were not getting doctors and nurses from abroad, I think is not very credible,” Portes said. “We have successfully introduced a new post-Brexit (immigration) system that is actually working pretty well. “It’s bizarre that the prime minister and the home secretary are sort of trashing the one thing that they’ve actually managed to do reasonably well for the last five years,” Jonathan Portes, an economist at King’s College London, told CNN. The most recent Conservative election manifesto, in 2019, included the pledge that under their leadership “there will be fewer lower-skilled migrants and overall numbers will come down.” But net migration has more than doubled since then. “What I would say is we’re considering a range of options to help tackle numbers of legal migration and to bring those numbers down – and we’ll talk more about that in the future,” Sunak said. He told the BBC at last week’s G7 summit that legal migration to the UK was “too high,” though he did not offer a specific plan to reduce it. Rishi Sunak has inherited and prolonged a long-running Conservative fixation over migration. Ministers have been criticized by rights organizations and politicians across the political divide for their use of hardline rhetoric against those people, with Braverman controversially rallying against an “invasion” of migrants across the Channel.Ĭritics of the government have long contended that Britain needs a steady influx of migrants in order to boost its workforce and support its ailing public services.īut before, during and since the bitter Brexit referendum campaign, in which lowering migration became a central debate, several Tory prime ministers have sought to appease the right wing of their party by making the reduction of migration a focal point of their premierships.ĭavid Cameron infamously insisted he would reduce net migration to the “tens of thousands” during his premiership, which ran from 2010 to 2016 – a vow that never came close to fruition, but which set the course for more than a decade of Tory fixation on the issue. The pair have sought to focus attention on refugees and asylum-seekers crossing the English Channel on small boats, rather than on overall migration, despite that route representing a tiny proportion of arrivals to the UK. Some observers had predicted Thursday’s figures would be higher the ONS said a slowing in immigration meant “levels of net migration have levelled off in recent quarters.”īut the headline figure will force difficult questions for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and his embattled Home Secretary Suella Braverman, both of whom have joined their predecessors in promising to reduce arrivals despite the strain on Britain’s public services, where key sectors like health care are marred by chronic staffing shortages. 'A Trump tribute act': Meet Suella Braverman, the commander-in-chief of Britain's culture wars (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images) Leon Neal/Getty Images However, delegates are arriving at the conference as the party lags 33 points behind Labour in the opinion polls. This year the Conservative Party Conference will be looking at "Getting Britain Moving" with more jobs and higher salaries. “The main drivers of the increase were people coming to the UK from non-EU countries for work, study and for humanitarian purposes,” Jay Lindop, Director of the Centre for International Migration at the ONS, said Thursday.īIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND - OCTOBER 04: UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman addresses the Conservative Party Conference at the ICC on Octoin Birmingham, England. The vast majority of people arriving – 925,000 – were non-EU nationals, and around one in 12 of those were asylum seekers, included for the first time in the ONS’ annual release. “These (figures) are down to world events, but they’re also down to how the UK government has chosen to respond to world events,” Rob McNeil, the deputy director of the Oxford Migration Observatory, told CNN. Thursday’s figures were affected by the lifting of Covid-19 travel restrictions and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which resulted in two new schemes by which Ukrainian refugees could resettle in the UK. ![]() That comes despite pledges from successive Conservative governments to drastically reduce the numbers of people moving to the UK, particularly in the wake of Brexit – a rupture that was touted by its proponents as a necessary step for Britain to “take control” of its borders. ![]() Net migration to Britain reached record levels last year, official figures showed Thursday, putting pressure on the UK government that has made the issue a political touchstone.īritain saw net migration of 606,000 people in 2022, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said, with 1.2 million people arriving in the country and about half that number leaving. ![]()
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