These shocking migration figures are just the beginning

For once, I agree with Keir on two counts: Brexit was a experience of opening the borders of a nation. In fact, I would go further. Since 2021, Britain has served as a testing laboratory for some of the world's most irrational and ill-conceived immigration rules.

Despite the public repeatedly and overwhelmingly voting in favor of lowering the numbers, Boris Johnson has embarked on an extraordinary liberalization of our visa system. The results were breathtaking. In the years before the EU referendum, net migration stood at around 300,000 people per year. Until June 2023, this figure has reached more than 900,000.

As astonishing as this failure is, the primary data only tells part of the story. As well as massively increasing the number of arrivals, Boris's changes have redirected migration flows from Europe to the rest of the world. The latest ONS estimates show that in the year to June 2024, net migration from the EU and EFTA was -95,000 people. Net migration from outside these countries was 845,000 people.

This happened despite clear warning signs about the possible consequences. We already knew from academic research that EEA migrants were most likely to contribute to public finances; between 1995 and 2011, migrants from EEA countries made a positive contribution of more than 4 billion, while migrants from outside this region absorbed 118 billion, or around 17 percent of the deficit in this region. period.

It seems it is very likely that the result of our new system will increase pressure on public finances when the economy is already sluggish and long-term budget projections have disastrous implications. GDP has stagnated; we learned this week that productivity in the second quarter fell 0.9 percent.

For years, economic orthodoxy has held that all migrant workers are contributors. That the higher the levels of immigration, the richer we will be. But the edifice began to collapse earlier this year with the OBR's stunning admission that low-wage migrant workers constitute a net tax leak once they enter the country. By the time they reach 81, they will have cost the taxpayer more than 450,000 euros.

Of course, this assumes that migrants come to Britain in search of work. A study by the Center for Policy Studies showed that only 15 percent of the net migration of more than two million third-country nationals over the past five years was mainly for work. Reform UK, meanwhile, has suggested that around 50,000 foreign nationals take eligibility tests each month to benefit from Universal Credit.

Boris, whose attention has too often focused on the pressing question of whether there was cheese in the fridge, now claims that businesses and government departments were panicking due to a lack of manpower to make move things forward. Maybe they were, although it doesn't seem like he found many. And if his government was serious about expanding the workforce, it should have started with the millions of economically inactive people, many of whom languish on welfare benefits despite being able to work.

Unfortunately, Starmer's anti-Brexit rhetoric is unlikely to translate into meaningful action. He is not even considering including immigration among the commitments he will unveil tomorrow in his Plan for Change, even though it touches virtually every other policy area. How, for example, will Labor reduce NHS waiting lists if our population explodes? Public services cannot hope to function if those who administer them have no idea how many people live in a given area. We will not solve the housing crisis when net migration is still expected to exceed Labour's hugely ambitious housebuilding targets.

The UK has long been an immigration success story: a country that welcomed new arrivals and offered refuge from persecution. Around 300 BC, a Greek explorer described the British inhabitants as particularly friendly towards foreigners. But the audience was pushed beyond its limits. They are tired of contributing to a system that always seems to put them last, of voting for commitments that are never kept. And they increasingly fear that this is just the beginning: as Guy Dampier of the Legatum Institute warns, these unprecedented levels are the prelude to something worse. After five years living in the UK, people can be granted indefinite leave to remain and sponsor family members to settle here. We may only be at the beginning of the wave.

Something has to give. Something is going to break. The only question is whether it will be our miserable immigration system or our struggling economy.