Britain has reached its immigration breaking point

Between 2022 and 2023 the population of England and Wales increased by over 600,000 – the biggest increase since 1949, when records began. This population explosion has been fuelled almost entirely by immigration.

That’s because in 2019, with Brexit done, a new and more liberal immigration system was put in place. Instead of taking back control, as had been promised to the British people, it threw the gates wide open.

Most of the increase was driven by two new visas. One was for care workers. Rather than increase wages in a sector dominated by British workers, it undercut them. Meanwhile the graduate visa was supposed to attract world-class talent by offering them two years work in Britain after graduation. Instead it created a bonanza in dubious one-year postgrad courses, offering a foot in the door of the British market, with many of these students working illegally for Deliveroo rather than starting tech unicorns.

Adding to the madness, both visas allowed for dependents to be brought along, leading whole families in the Global South to decamp here.

The result is that our economy has seen a huge influx of low-skilled workers, on top of the millions who have entered our country since the Blair government turned us from a country of emigration in the 1990s into a country of mass migration. Instead of the promised economic boom, we’ve seen GDP per capita fall, meaning that even if the economy is technically growing, individually we are actually getting poorer.

This excess of labour, which is entirely the result of government decisions to keep levels of legal immigration high, has warped the economy. Rather than invest in automation, which would deliver more productivity and therefore more growth, we’ve seen Britain fall behind our international competitors in adopting industrial robots. Famously, automatic car washes have decreased in number since the 2000s, being replaced by hand washes manned by migrants.

In addition, all of these people have placed greater stress on our infrastructure. We haven’t built a new reservoir since the 1990s, while we’ve added millions of new people. As a result, we get hosepipe bans every year and the sewage system has to flush waste into rivers when the Victorian piping can’t handle the scale of usage. The same is true across roads, railways, hospitals, dental clinics and much more. No amount of investment can match the increase in population driven by immigration.

Some of this is also due to demographic changes in our population. Lots of people are living longer and longer thanks to medical improvements, which has a big cost as the elderly use health care much more than the rest of us. At the same time, too few children are being born to replace the workers who retire. Inevitably higher costs and fewer taxpayers strains public services.

Immigration is sometimes touted as a solution. If British people won’t have babies then we need foreigners to keep the economy going. The issue is that not all workers are alike. There is now academic literature showing that workers from Western countries, like Japan or America, are a net fiscal benefit but that non-Western workers are a net fiscal negative. Unfortunately the latter make up the vast majority of those coming here to work.

There’s also no way that immigrants can solve the demographic crisis, as they too will get old and need care. In fact, they probably make it worse: too many immigrants are a major reason for our sky-high property prices, which make it hard for young people to buy a house and have children. If more than half your income goes on rent, there isn’t much left for raising a family.

So to manage the strain we need both a sharp reduction in immigration and record-breaking expansion of our infrastructure, including housing. That doesn’t mean all immigration needs to cease. We know that some migrants really do add to our society – but they make up only a few tens of thousands of the millions coming here. By setting a high income requirement to come here, ending exemptions, and shutting down other routes in, we could achieve this.

The new government has made much of their pragmatism. The record of the Conservative years is clear: mass immigration makes no fiscal sense. The pragmatic option is to sharply reduce migration, reducing the environmental impact and incentivising business to invest in productivity-raising automation. Britain could be both welcoming and thriving.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/16/migration-britains-population-explosion-demographics/

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