>Britain Is Getting the Immigration Debate All Wrong
GDP lover and one of the architects of New Labours mass immigration project, Jonathan Portes, is going to tell us what we're getting wrong about immigration.
>Farage may well be Prime Minister come the next general election, and worryingly, unveiled plans for mass deportations today.
>The Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Philp, has falsely claimed that half of social housing in London was occupied by “foreigners.”
The correction here being that they're foreign born, not foreign nationals. A big difference, especially when only 2% of white Brits are born abroad.
>Part of the issue is that the debate around immigration is not moored in reality. Politicians and the media have focused incessantly on the “small boats” carrying asylum-seekers who make the dangerous journey across the English Channel. That has fed a national perception that the U.K. has lost control of its borders, and at a local level, the crossings are a very visible and extended sign of policy failure as asylum-seekers are housed in hotels for extended periods.
>A recent YouGov poll suggests that nearly half of Britons think that irregular migrants are the majority, despite legal migration constituting more than 90% of the 3 million-plus who moved to the U.K. over the past four years.
I'm sure correcting them will satiate them and not cause them to see legal migration as an even bigger issue.
>So where next? Net migration is falling fast—down more than half from its 2023 peak as the extraordinary post-pandemic surge recedes and the center-left Labour government pursues more restrictive measures. It will fall further.
Above where it was pre-Boriswave is hardly an improvement.