Number crunch: why Britons ignore immigrant drop
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Economist.
Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Blore. And
I'm Jason Palmer.
Today on the show, aboard a US nuclear submarine, and which products actually fight wrinkles?
First up though.
Імміграція Британгари бомбаст цикл.
Joel Budd is our social affairs editor.
After the COVID pandemic, when Britain started to allow people to move freely into the country, the number of immigrants rose very, very dramatically to the sort of levels that Britain has never seen. In the year to March twenty twenty three, more than one and a half million immigrants arrived in the country, intending to stay for more than a year or so at least. And many, many fewer left. So net migration, which is what Britain tends to obsess over, went above nine hundred thousand per year. So it was as though a city the size of Birmingham had suddenly materialized in the country. Who were they? They were a mixture.
Why did Britain experience a sudden boom in immigration after the pandemic?
Some were Hong Kongers and Ukrainians because the British government had favoured people from those countries recognizing that Hong Kongers were facing oppression and Ukrainians, of course, invasion. Some were students who were taking advantage of much more liberal rules about working after graduation, but quite a few of them were simply workers. Britain made it easier to get a work visa.
So why was the British government at that time so welcoming to immigrants?
It's slightly strange because in a sense it was welcoming to immigrants because it had become unwelcoming to Europeans specifically. Britain left the EU in 2020, and in early 2021, it cancelled free movement. So before then, it had been possible for a French person or a Polish person to simply move to Britain and take whatever job they wanted. And it became impossible. So the government Thought, well, hang on a second. You know, many of our industries have really depended on Europeans, and the famous one was the hospitality industry. And we don't want to have nobody coming into the country to do those sorts of jobs in future. So what we will do is we'll make it easier for everybody to get a work visa.
And what happened was very few Europeans took Britain up on that offer. like Polish migration to Britain completely collapsed. But many people from Asia and Africa did. The number of work and study visas given to Indians tripled between twenty nineteen and twenty twenty two. Indians were the big group. Nigerians were the second biggest.
So that's the boom of the cycle that you described. Now tell me about the bust since then.
After the extraordinarily high figures that we saw in twenty twenty-two, twenty twenty-three, British government panicked and slammed on the brakes and then threw the car into reverse. British governments, beginning with the last Conservative government and now the current Labour government, have made it harder to get into the country almost by any means. So they made it harder for workers to get into get in by moving the salary thresholds upwards. In other words, you need to be earning more money in order to get a work visa. They've made it harder for spouses to come in. They've made it less attractive for universities to bring in lots of foreign students. They've made life harder for asylum seekers.
And so in just about every way, they've tried to crush the numbers.
Which groups made up the majority of the post‑pandemic immigration surge?
Because it's politically expedient to do so?
Yes, most British people think that there is too much immigration and most of the people who disagree with that think that the amount of immigration is about right. In other words, there are very few people in the country who think there should be more immigration. So it looks like a sort of one way bet for a government to just suppress immigration.
But what about the argument from before that basically Britain society needs those workers?
One of the things I was looking at in my article is given that we had this enormous boom of people and then a bust, who were they? Because the government tends to describe them in pretty disparaging terms. It tends to say, well, they were unskilled, they were often doing jobs in care homes, they were bringing their children, they will quite rapidly become burdens on the state, and so on and so forth.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:03–1:33
2
Why did Britain experience a sudden boom in immigration after the pandemic?
1:33–4:02
3
Which groups made up the majority of the post‑pandemic immigration surge?
4:02–7:00
4
How did the UK government reverse the immigration boom and what policies were introduced?
7:00–10:01
5
What impact did the tougher immigration stance have on Labour’s poll numbers?
10:01–14:05
6
Why is the US Navy deploying a Virginia‑class submarine in the Pacific?
14:05–16:15
7
How do modern submarines detect and stay hidden from Chinese and Russian forces?
16:15–20:15
8
What causes skin to age and which ingredients actually reduce wrinkles?
20:15–22:50