Record number of immigrants arrive in the UK in 2022, putting pressure on the Conservative Party

The net balance of immigrants who arrived in the United Kingdom in 2022 was 606,000 people, according to figures published this Thursday by the Office for National Statistics (ONS, in its acronym in English). This represents a record figure of 24% more than the 488,000 people registered a year earlier. Despite the fact that the forecasts of experts (for example, the Center for Political Studies) came to suggest a much higher net balance -between 700,000 and one million immigrants-, the known data increases the pressure on Rishi Sunak and the Conservative Party .

Since 2010, when the net balance was 250,000 and then-Prime Minister David Cameron promised to reduce the numbers to “a few tens of thousands”, the tories They have not stopped repeating the same promise while colliding with the growing wall of migratory reality. Sunak himself, although he has already forgotten his commitment to lower the figures by half, continues to promise results that do not arrive.

In 2022, according to the ONS, the total number of immigrants arriving in the United Kingdom was close to 1.2 million. The net balance arises from subtracting from that figure the 557,000 people who left the country that same year. In all, the equivalent of a city like Glasgow was incorporated into the mass of the British population.

The paradox of the situation is that the vast majority of new immigrants are from outside the EU. Since Brexit went ahead, under the banner of the take back control (let’s take back control, a slogan that was mostly about borders), the flow of new arrivals onto British soil has gotten completely out of control, but the numbers of EU citizens have only dwindled.

Of the total number of people who moved to the UK in 2022, 925,000 were from non-EU countries. Just 151,000 of the total number were EU citizens, along with about 88,000 Britons who returned to their land.

“The main component that explains this increase in immigration figures is made up of people from non-EU countries who have come in search of work, studies or for humanitarian reasons, and that includes all those who came from Ukraine or Hong Kong” , explained Jay Lindopp, the director of the Center for International Migration, which is part of the ONS.

In 2022 alone, the United Kingdom welcomed 463,000 foreign students, attracted by the fame and prestige of university education. A large part of them will remain in the country for several more years, or permanently. And they have the right to bring their relatives with them.

Boris Johnson’s government opened its doors to all residents of the former colony of Hong Kong who wanted to flee the restriction of freedoms imposed by Beijing. More than 52,000 people took advantage of the offer last year, in addition to 76,000 asylum seekers.

And finally, hundreds of thousands of people from the Ukraine (114,000 in this case, according to the ONS census) and Afghanistan have used perfectly legal ways to acquire their British residence.

Domestic political crisis among conservatives

The hard wing of the Conservative Party has turned anti-immigration discourse into a substitute flag for a Brexit that is increasingly notorious, to the point that a populist politician who reached the front row with anti-EU discourse, such as Nigel Farage , has recently admitted that the exit from the European Union “has been a failure”.

The emerging figures among that neoconservatism that sharpens its teeth, before the foreseeable electoral fall of Sunak within a year, have begun to harden their discourse. Among them is the Minister of the Interior, Suella Braverman, who managed to inflame the attendees of the conference organized by the internal current National Conservatism two weeks ago. “It is not xenophobic to say that massive and accelerated immigration is not sustainable when it comes to providing housing or services [a los recién llegados]”, defended Braverman, of Indian origin and daughter of immigrants from Kenya. “It is not prejudicial to say that there are too many people who have come here illegally and claim asylum. We do not have enough means to accommodate them, ”the minister cheered her followers.

Labor’s fine line

Keir Starmer’s Labor Party walks a fine line on immigration. Aware of the unpopularity that the matter continues to have among the part of its electorate closest to the Brexit theses, the left-wing formation rejects the requests of the employers to increase the quota of work visas and promises that, when it reaches the Government, will make British citizens fill those positions.

Although its promise, modeled on that made by Boris Johnson’s government in its day, is also hardly realistic, according to experts in the British labor market, Labor has the easy advantage of being able to undo, with a play on words, the slogans of the Conservative Party. “They have lost control over this matter [frente al take back control prometido]. They have failed to come up with a strategy to address the tensions in our labor market, and the result has been companies desperately clinging to foreign labour,” Labor Immigration spokesman Stephen Kinnock.

The Labor opposition has been able to learn the most important lesson of recent years, and is reluctant to put into figures any commitment to reduce the volume of immigrants.

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