A million is a nice round figure, so consider this: in the year ending in June this year some 1.2 million people came to live in Britain. More than a million of them came from outside Europe. That’s quite a big deal, no, for one year? To employ the usual metric, it is over a third the size of Wales. Over 80 per cent of immigrants to Britain – 86 per cent, to be precise – are from outside the EU, and it has been over 80 per cent every year since 2022.
Net migration, which is the statistic normally used, was 728,000 in the year ending June 2024, but revised data from the ONS shows it hit 906,000 the previous year. That’s nearly a million net, and over 1.3 million overall. Net immigration fell by a fifth this year but it is still running at almost triple the level we saw pre-Brexit. But I’m not sure that the net figure – people coming in minus people leaving – quite does justice to the scale of the change that these enormous figures entail. The overwhelming majority of those entering will be from very different cultures, with the challenges for integration that this – with the best will in the world – means.
