What is the problem?

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Introduction

The current level of immigration into the UK is unsustainable.

While the number of visas issued in 2024 is slightly lower than 2023, this is still a historically high number:¹ In 2022 there were 1.16m visas issued; already unprecedented and beyond acceptable, this rose again in 2023 to 1.36m. Falling slightly to 933,874 in 2024, there is no way this can continue; the average for the last three years is equivalent to the population of Birmingham, Britain’s second largest city.

In fact, immigration is the sole cause for Britain’s population growth.

Meanwhile, the 2025 ONS figures put the level of net immigration for 2024 at 431,000 per year, after peaking at 906,000 in mid-2023.

The authorities have shown themselves unable or unwilling to ensure that our borders are protected and secure. The Pew Research Centre estimates that there were between 800,000 and 1,200,000 illegal immigrants living in Britain in 2017, and with nearly 200,000 people having entered the country via illegal means in just under five years, there is no doubt this is much higher now.

Since 2018, over 150,000 illegal immigrants have crossed the English Channel alone. The level of immigration needs to be reduced and proper and effective control of the UK border must be restored.

Why does this matter?

The crux of the debate is not ‘immigration: yes or no’, good or bad? The key questions are whether immigration is benefiting the people of this country; is running at a pace that is sustainable and controlled; is lawful; and is acceptable to the people of Britain.

A country has the right to decide who to allow in. All countries have border controls and all face - and ask - legitimate questions over who to admit and who to turn away. The key questions are about who and how many people are good for our economy and society.

As is befitting an organisation that is chaired by a first-generation migrant, we know only too well that most migrants have come to the UK legally and for understandable reasons; for a better life for themselves and their family. Many accept their adopted country for what it is and to fit in – integrate or assimilate, and make a positive contribution to our society by plugging skills’ or labour shortages..

However, as many migrants themselves recognise, the UK is already a crowded place, and the current pace of immigration-driven population growth is placing serious pressure on housing, the NHS and GP surgeries, transport, schools and utilities – all of which are struggling to cope. In May 2025, The Telegraph showed that mass immigration is already straining our water supply.

Also concerning is the way in which immigration is leading to rapid cultural and societal change. As the former integration czar Baroness Louise Casey said, some areas of our country have changed ‘beyond recognition’ in a very short space of time. Indeed, this process is accelerating, with a number of communities finding their local way of life rapidly changing, making them feel like strangers in their own country.

Not only this, but the abysmal failure to effectively control immigration on the part of the government is having a harmful impact on public safety and on the values we hold dear.

And, as the growth of the immigrant population rises due to both mass immigration and the number of births of second- and third-generation immigrants, the possibility of the White British becoming a minority becomes all but certain. No society has ever changed so radically and rapidly and managed to navigate that change successfully; there is nothing to suggest that we are any different.

There has been no recent official projection but a number of academic projections in the past decade or so suggest that, on present policies, the share of the White British as a proportion of the total population will fall below 50% before the end of the current century.

Furthermore, the political influence of minorities are expected to become much stronger well before then as all political parties compete for their votes. Already, we have witnessed this: in 2025 Anas Sarwar, Leader of the Scottish National Party, encouraged Pakistanis to “ascend to the corridors of power”.

Population projections in his 2010 paper, ‘Population and Development Review’, David Coleman, Emeritus Professor of Demography at Oxford University, foresaw the White British becoming a minority in the country by the mid-2060s. Two more recent academic projections , included in the table below, anticipate the majority becoming a minority a little earlier:

A similar range of projections for Britain and EU countries have been made by Eurostat and by some European academics. All the projections above expect the White British population to decline in absolute and relative terms.

The first two projections do not extend beyond 2061 but trends in all three point towards a situation in which the White British population would become a minority of the UK. However, all projections depend on the assumptions made and events (such as net migration levels, birth rates and death rates) could change them in either direction.

In June 2025, Matthew Goodwin, Visiting Professor of the University of Buckingham, published a paper on ‘Demographic Change and the Future of the United Kingdom: 2022-2122’, with the same conclusions: “by the end of the current century, by 2100, around six in ten people in the UK will either not have been born in the UK or born to UK-born parents.”

To preserve the society we have inherited and pass it on, it is imperative to cut immigration drastically.

The scale of immigration

Immigration is now the primary cause of population growth.

Since 2000, the scale and pace of immigration has been unprecedented in our history. The UK has always experienced periods of immigration, but never on remotely the same scale as that which we have witnessed over the past two and a half decades.

In 1997, net migration was just 47,000. In the years that followed it rose to well over 200,000, reaching 267,000 in 2005. Under the Labour government of that time (1997-2010), an extra 3.6 million foreign migrants arrived, while one million British citizens left - meaning net migration for the period was roughly 2,600,000.

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government that formed in 2010 pledged to reduce net migration to the ‘tens of thousands’ (a promise that was repeated in 2015 and 2017). However, overall net migration rose to more than a third of a million – even higher than under Labour.

This is largely because net migration from the EU doubled in the 2010s due to the ongoing disparity in wealth between Eastern Europe and the UK, together with the impact of the Eurozone crisis on Southern Europe. This no doubt contributed significantly to the June 2016 referendum result.

The Conservatives, who held the reins at the Home Office, between 2010 and 2024, also failed to reduce immigration as they had repeatedly promised. Indeed, the situation has run out of control in the opposite direction: not only had immigration reached nearly 240,000 by 2021, but in the year to mid-2023 was approaching a million at 906,000 and the figures for the whole of 2023 was 860,000. The most recent ONS release revealed a provisional net migration figure of 430,000 for the year to 31 December 2024. It is worth noting that this, seemingly, significant fall was largely due to measures belatedly introduced by the Tories. We do not expect net migration to continue falling on this scale while employers and universities continue to have, pretty much a free hand to recruit unlimited numbers overseas.

Remember, 430,000 (a provisional figure) is close to 10 times net migration in 1997 and considerably more than double net migration in 2019 (184,000)

Record numbers of long-term visas have been issued in recent years: 1,100,000 in 2022,1,300,000 in 2023 and nearly 900,000 in 2024.

Why is the current level of immigration a problem?

The scale and pace of immigration impacts a range of issues across public and political life, with serious ramifications for the future of the country.

Population

The population density estimate of England in 2021 was 429 people per square kilometre.

This makes England the most densely populated nation in Europe. It is ahead of the Netherlands, which has 423/km2; is three-and-a-half times as crowded as France (116/km2); and just under twice as crowded as Germany (232/km2).

The UK as a whole (271/km2) is also the most crowded large country in Europe.

High immigration is driving rapid population growth. New data from the 2021 Census shows that 57.5% of the growth of the population of England and Wales was due to the direct impact of net immigration, while a significant share of so-called ‘natural increase’ is also related to immigration (i.e. a result of births to non-UK born parents).

Indeed, we have calculated that well-over four-fifths of total population growth since 2001 was due directly or indirectly to immigration, rising to 90% in 2017-19 and probably higher still since then.

The UK population stood at 67 million in 2020/21, having risen by eight million or so over the previous twenty years, of which about seven million was due to net migration and the children born to migrants). Read our paper on this topic, as well as our population summary.

An ONS data release on 8 October 2024 estimated the population of the UK in mid-2023 to be 68.3 million, an increase of 1% on the population at mid-2022. There were 16,300 more deaths than births in this period, meaning a net population increase of 677,000. Meanwhile, non-UK born mothers were giving birth to 2.2 children compared to 1.44 births per UK born mother. The 1% increase in population was entirely due to migration (including the children born to non-UK born mothers).

Infrastructure

Under all these projections the population looks set to rise further from its present record size of 68.3 million, rising to over 70 million by the mid-2030s. Indeed, ONS projections published in January 2024 indicated that the UK population in mid-2021 of 67 million would increase by 6.6 million by 2036, taking the population to 73.6 million. 6.1 million (92%) of this increase will be due to net migration and the children born to migrants.

As a result of such growth, huge amounts will have to be spent on the expansion of school places, roads, rail, health and other infrastructure (read more about the impact of immigration on public services and infrastructure).

For example, in 2020 there were nearly 700,000 new GP registrations by migrants.

Housing

Mass immigration is clearly worsening the housing crisis. It has ‘increased the overall demand for housing’ and ‘increases house prices’. As of 2019, one home would have to be built every five minutes, night and day, just to cope with record levels of immigration to England; there is absolutely no doubt this has been outpaced even further by immigration.

According to the Chartered Institute of Housing’s publication, ‘Housing Today’, England alone is 2.5 million homes short, and requires 550,000 homes to be built annually to come close to solving the housing crisis. How much easier if it would be without population growing at a rate of notes and now driven entirely by migration.

Unless immigration is brought down the housing crisis will continue indefinitely, largely to the detriment of our young people. The UK’s green countryside will continue to be swallowed up by construction of housing. Increasing numbers of UK councils are setting aside green belt land to be bulldozed.

Little economic benefit, and harmful for the poorest

For a long time, it has been claimed that migration has economically benefitted the United Kingdom. The government’s own immigration White Paper from May 2025 admitted this was false, detailing stagnating GDP growth (just 3.4% since 2019, compared to the US’ 12% in the same period); immigration from low-skilled workers “distorting the labour market”, and displacing workers in six out of 10 key industries; and, most damning, conceding GDP per capita has fallen, meaning the average Brit is worse off, continually since 2022. So much so that our GDP per capita is now lower than before the Covid pandemic, as explained in the May 2025 Immigration White Paper:

Despite the significantly high levels of net migration over recent years, GDP per capita has also stagnated, falling in every quarter since 2022 and by Quarter 2 2024, real GDP per capita was 0.6% below its pre-COVID-19 pandemic level.

Our own economics briefing warned that this was the case years ago, while the academic research points to immigration resulting in a clear fiscal cost to the UK. Between 1995 and 2011, immigrants in the UK cost at least £114 billion, or about £18m a day, according to University College, London research.

Likewise, a 2018 report for the Migration Advisory Committee estimated that immigrants overall cost the Exchequer £4.3 billion, adding to the UK's fiscal deficit. On paragraph 4.11, it was admitted that while EEA migrants contributed a net benefit of £4.7bn, this was considerably outweighed by a cost of £9bn for non-EEA migrants.

On this evidence, immigration does not generate the tax receipts needed for migrants to 'pay their way' let alone to finance the new infrastructure or anything else required by rapid population growth.

Additionally, despite the number of migrant workers growing by over two million since 2006, productivity (key to economic performance) has flat-lined. Arguments that immigration to the UK is vital for the economy, in particular that it is enhancing UK productivity, are often disingenuous and exaggerated.

The findings of cross-country studies are not necessarily applicable to the UK – indeed they appear not to be so in key regards – and the findings of UK studies fail to provide convincing support to these arguments.

Immigration has been proven to depress wages for poorer workers. The availability of a large pool of labour from abroad has taken the pressure off employers to raise wages. Uncontrolled, mass immigration is likely to be holding back wages for those in direct competition for work, which is often those who are already on low pay – both UK-born and previous migrants.

A 2015 Bank of England study found a negative impact on the wages of those in the lower skilled services sector in which millions of UK workers are employed. Meanwhile, the Resolution Foundation has found that immigration over the period 2009-2016 ‘resulted in native wages for those in skilled trades occupations [electricians, plumbers and bricklayers] being 2.1% lower’.

Public opinion

While voters have consistently expressed scepticism of the scale of immigration, and often desires for it to be reduced, 2025 has seen a major turning point in public opinion. In May, Merlin Strategy revealed that 63% of the public wants immigration to be lower than 100,000 - and 23% said they wanted negative migration.

Likewise, YouGov’s issues tracker in the same month showed that immigration has become the most important topic.

Only by delivering a major reduction in immigration can the government begin to remedy what has become a huge credibility gap. In a democracy, it is essential that public policy is responsive to the public’s wishes and that election promises are honoured.

The unity of our society

Too many people coming too quickly into a society makes it difficult to retain a sense of cohesion and stability (Policy Exchange, 2017)

Immigration is simply too high for successful integration to occur. In 2016, Dame Louise Casey reported that some areas of the UK were ‘changing out of all recognition’ and struggling to cope with the pace of transformation, while also pointing to a growth in ‘regressive ideologies’.

These included religious and cultural practices targeting women and children (female genital mutilation, forced marriage, 'honour' based crime, educational segregation and stultification) and the ‘hate and stigmatisation’ of LGBTQ+ people.

Polling also indicates that UK society is becoming more fractured as the result of immigration. In 2018, Demos found that around three quarters of the public said immigration had increased divisions. Reducing immigration, and restoring border control, is crucial to ensuring a cohesive community in which all are treated with dignity and in which British culture and values are protected and enriched.

This needs to stop

Immigration has spiralled out of control, and our society is changing rapidly as a result. To preserve it, and to ensure we have one worth passing on, mass migration must end. If it does not, it is not a matter of whether the native British will become a minority in the country of their forebears but when. And certainly much sooner than Professor Coleman’s 2010 projection of mid 2060s.

You can support our work by donating here, or taking action to contact your MP and tell them why net migration must come down.

Updated 24 June 2025