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LONDON — Britain left the European Union with a goal of regaining control of its borders, and several post-Brexit prime ministers have vowed to curb immigration, but new data released on Thursday instead showed immigration continued to squeeze the UK’s population increases.
According to the Office for National Statistics, around 1.2 million people arrived in the UK and 557,000 people left the country in 2022, representing a net migration of 606,000.
“The numbers are too high, it’s as simple as that,” British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told ITV after the figures were released. “I want to bring her down.”
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A closer look at the statistics reveals the very real impact of Brexit: more EU citizens are leaving the country than are arriving in the UK. Last year there was a net loss of 51,000 EU citizens.
But there has been an increase in the number of people coming from the rest of the world, particularly to work in health and social care. There were also more international students, accounting for almost 40 percent of all non-EU migrants in 2022.
Britain also accepted more than 110,000 Ukrainians and 50,000 Hong Kongers on special visas.
Public attitudes towards immigration have changed dramatically since the 2016 Brexit vote. Overall, according to immigration tracker Ipsos, there has been a “gradual warming”.
Polls show that Britons are now more concerned about inflation and the economy than immigration.
Immigration concerns were the trigger for the Brexit vote. Then the attitudes changed.
Rob Ford, a politics professor at the University of Manchester, noted during a Twitter Spaces session on Thursday that there was a sharp rise in public support for immigration, which could help fill labor shortages in sectors such as restaurants, construction and fruit picking remedy.
“The architects of Brexit should be cheering,” said Ford. “We have a system that the voters approve of and when the pressure on the labor market increases, the voters say ‘okay’.” That’s where the voters are. We need the politicians to catch up with them.”
But Conservative voters are more concerned about immigration than Labor voters, and a tough stance on immigration has proven electoral winners for previous Conservative governments. The current one is also based on this.
Sunak has said he wants to bring net migration below 500,000, the number he “inherited” when he took office. His government has also made curbing the arrival of asylum seekers on “small boats” one of its top five pledges ahead of the next general election, due in January 2025.
Conservatives hope the focus on immigration will help strengthen their base. According to a recent poll, they are 18 points behind the opposition Labor Party.
The new numbers released on Thursday tell many stories, one of which is that net migration may have peaked.
Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, said net migration figures in 2022 were “unusually high”, due in part to the war in Ukraine, a boom in international student recruitment and high demand for health care and health services attributed to nurses.
While it is difficult to predict future trends, she said, “there is no reason to assume that net migration will remain so high indefinitely.”