Shabana Mahmood must not rest on her laurels

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Shabana Mahmood will be pleased. New Office for National Statistics (ONS) data shows that net migration fell to 171,000 in 2025, the lowest level (outside of Covid) in any calendar year since 2008. On the current trajectory, it will fall below 100,000 for the first time since 1997 this year or next.

Job done, then? Well, not quite. 

A useful analogy here is with inflation. Ever since 2023, politicians have had an unfortunate habit of boasting about ‘inflation coming down’. For voters though, this can ring a bit hollow: prices are still rising – just at a slower rate than before – and the cost of their weekly shop is still much higher than it was a few years ago. They still feel poorer compared to recent memory. 

Migration is coming down, but that doesn’t alter the fact that recent years have seen the population of migrants in Britain rise to an unprecedented level. Gross immigration over 2021-25 was an incredible 5.6 million people. Net migration was 2.7 million, equivalent to population growth of about 4%, or the combined populations of Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester.

As I pointed out last year in ‘A Migration Revolution?’, the so-called ‘Boriswave’ of post-2020 migration has some claim to be the most demographically significant event in modern British history. In 2022 we saw the fastest rate of population growth since 1828, and in each of 2022, 2023 and 2024, the population increased in absolute terms by more than any other year on record. Immigration drove over 99% of the increase.

Moreover, once you account for net emigration of over 500,000 British nationals (including both UK-born and naturalised citizens), net migration of non-UK citizens was 3.2 million people over 2021-25 – about 4.8% of the pre-Boriswave population. 

In other words, almost 1 in 20 people resident in Britain today arrived in just the last five years.

This represents an unprecedented degree of demographic churn. We’ve not had an official figure for the foreign-born share of the UK population since the 2021/22 census, which came in at 16.0%. According to the new ONS data, it stood at 18.9% in June 2024. My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest it was roughly 19.9% by the end of 2025. 

So around one in every five people living in Britain today was born overseas, up from around one in 12 at the turn of the century. 

Most voters don’t pay much attention to immigration data and are quite bad at quantifying flows. One poll found that people thought net migration was 70,000 when the official data had it at over 700,000 and gross immigration at 1.2 million (and subsequent revisions found net and gross to be 891,000 and 1.4 million respectively).  

However, the problem for politicians is that people do register and intuit the changes they see around them in day-to-day life. They don’t have to know the exact percentage increase in the price of a kWh of electricity or a pint of milk to know prices are significantly higher than five years ago. Similarly, while the flow of migrants might be falling, the stock of migrants is still much, much higher than a few years ago (and rising still). 

Three other factors are contributing to the glaring visibility of demographic change:

First, immigration flows have swung decisively to non-EU migration, with a net outflow of EU migrants over recent years. The top ten migrant origin countries since 2021 have been India (1.03 million migrants), Nigeria (481,000), China (384,000), Pakistan (324,000), Ukraine (217,000), Bangladesh (115,000), America (93,000), Ghana 89,000), Nepal (79,000) and Australia (46,000). The non-EU, non-UK born share of the population was 13.3% by June 2024, up from 10.0% at the census. 

Second, there seems to a lot of internal migration, with both recent and more established migrants cascading out from the big cities where migrants usually live to provincial and rural Britain. There are 70 local authorities in England where the population increased by at least 1,000 people in the year to June 2024 and where more than 100% of the net population growth was driven by international migration. In the non-metropolitan district of Worcester, 110% of population growth was due to international migration; in Crawley in West Sussex it was 160%; in Colchester in Essex it was 224%. 

Third, there are the small boats and other asylum seekers. The boats are still coming – 7,576 illegal migrants so far this year and counting – and more importantly, Labour are emptying the migrant hotels by dispersing asylum seekers and Afghan refugees to HMOs around the country. Large concentrations of asylum seekers are leaving London and other big cities. Almost every local authority in Britain now houses asylum seekers or Afghan refugees. In the words of Neil O’Brien MP: ‘Rather like blowing on a dandelion, the Home Office are dispersing people all over the country’. There has also been a horrifying spate of headlines about asylum seeker and migrant-related sexual crime. 

Given all these factors, while immigration might not be the top issue for the public right now, it’s unlikely to disappear as a major concern any time soon, especially given that around 47% of the public already think immigration over the last ten years has been ‘mostly bad for the country’. 

As far as the public are concerned, it is the stock as much as the flow of migrants which impinge on daily life in the most obvious ways. This is going to be tricky for politicians to deal with. Full social and economic integration of the massively expanded foreign-born share of the population is likely to be a 50- or 60-year project, even if net migration were at zero throughout such a period of time. 

And at the moment, that is looking unlikely. The latest net figures are flattered by elevated emigration levels after the 2021-24 immigration surge. Once they washe out of the stats, all the underlying drivers of rising immigration – such as global economic growth and chain migration on family visas – will still be there. Gross immigration was still 813,000 in 2025. Experts I’ve spoken to think net migration will dip further in 2026/27 but will trend back up towards 250,000 per annum (so 2010s levels) before a 2029 election.

It has been a good ONS data release for Shabana Mahmood – a rarity for a Home Secretary. But she would be ill-advised to rest on her laurels now.

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