New ONS figures show that annual net migration halved from 806,000 to 431,000 in 2024.
The provisional estimate for total migration has fallen from 1.326 million in 2023 to 948,000 in 2024.
Emigration is up by 11%, to 517,000 — largely driven by European (218,000) and British (77,000) nationals.
They were replaced by 544,000 (81%) new non-EU arrivals — continuing the trend of unprecedented, culturally distant demographic change since immigration laws were liberalised after Brexit.
157,000 Indian, 76,000 Pakistani, 70,000 Chinese, and 52,000 Nigerian nationals comprised the largest share.
Zimbabweans, the fifth largest group in 2023 (36,000), seem to have stopped coming after they could no longer admittedly game the system by bringing 10 dependents for every one health and social care worker.
Work visas for non-EU applicants fell by 49% (-108,000); work dependents by 35% (-81,000); and study dependents by 86% (-105,000).
Loathe though I am to attribute competence to the last Conservative government, the fall in student and care worker dependent visas are due to their efforts to mitigate a disaster of their own making. Labour’s proposed changes to the immigration system have not gone into effect yet.
Celebrating this reduction in numbers to world-historical levels, still higher than before Brexit, is, as I wrote for Courage Media, like defecating in the bathtub, then cheering when you switch to just urinating in it instead.
Nevertheless, Keir Starmer, in an attempt to stem the haemorrhaging of Red Wall Labour voters to Reform UK, has still boasted about the falling figures.
The Conservative opposition are trying to introduce further measures, including reinstating the Rwanda deterrent and imposing an annual binding migration cap.
The problem the Prime Minister will encounter is that his own Cabinet is full of demented ideologues for whom the belief that “Diversity is our strength” is a statement of faith, and will resist any policies which seek to restrict migrant inflows further.
Home Office minister Dame Angela Eagle said, during the opposition motion debate:
Too often, the Opposition parties—some of the Opposition parties; not all of them—perpetuate a narrative that is increasingly dangerous. Let us not dehumanise fellow human beings. [...]
It is very important to remember that we thrive—as we always have in our history—with a tolerant, multicultural society in which we strive to understand each other and get on with each other, rather than to divide and seek to cause resentments, which some people with their own political narratives do, and that is regrettable.
How can those still clinging to the lie that multiculturalism is an unalloyed good, that mass immigration is an economic benefit, and that Diversity does anything but divide and destroy our organic, high-trust society, be relied upon to conduct a reduction in all those things?
The only positive is that, as SNP MP Pete Wishart said, there is now a rhetorical arms race between the three main parties to appear the strongest on immigration:
The whole debate about immigration is descending into an ugly place which seems to fire the obnoxious and the unpleasant. I am talking not only about those two parties but about the Government too, and I am now going to direct my blame at some of the things they are doing. A new consensus is emerging in the House. For all the faux arguments and fabricated disagreements, the three parties are now more or less united in a new anti-immigrant landscape in the House. The only thing that seems to separate them is the question of who can be the hardest and the toughest in this grotesque race to the bottom on asylum, refugees and immigration.
The fear of Reform percolates through every sinew in this House. It dominates every single debate, and everything that is going on. Reform is killing the Conservatives, but Labour seems to want a bit of the self-destruction action too. Everything the Government do on immigration is now looked at through the prism of Reform, and they have even started to get the Prime Minister to use Reform’s language. The hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) could not have been more generous in his tribute to the Prime Minister for his contribution to nasty rhetoric. The thing is, the “island of strangers” speech could have been made by any one of these three parties.
I only wish we had as hostile a body politics to mass immigration as that which lives in the fevered imagination of traitorous liberals.
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