I think that immigration is really poorly reported as we only ever receive a headline number of immigrants. There's no explanation of why immigration has increased or breakdown of the categories of immigrant and whether they will be net contributors or not. For example, take university students: around 290,000 overseas students came to the UK to study in 2022/3 and brought a further 90,000 dependents. Our further education funding has changed dramatically in the 38 years since I graduated to the extent that without the income from overseas students who make up 25% of the total and pay 2-4x what a UK student pays the sector would either collapse or more likely the taxpayer would need to find an addtional £7 billion a year. Essentially the overseas students are subsidising the UK students. At the end of their study around 40% of overseas students, around 150,000, remain in the UK.
This is a bargain for UK plc - a large number of well educated young people where the UK has spent nothing on their upkeep and education. Even more so since the vast majority of overseas students take subjects that are directly useful to employers, like medicine, science or engineering (I spoke to the dean of Electronic Engineering at my old university a couple of years ago and he told me 82 out of 100 students in that intake year were from overseas).
There are similar arguments that can be made on other immigrants who come here to work - the 50,000 who join the NHS is the most quoted example but there are plenty of others who come to work in all industries, especially social care. Economically these would be classed along with the students in the "desirable immigrant" category in that they make a net positive contribution in skills and cash to the economy. However current government policy is that those immigrants that come with non-working family need to cover the cost of state provided services for their family hence the recent increase in salary required for a skills working visa bringing your spouse/partner from £26K/year to £39K/year. This group caused most of the increase in numbers last year.
Only 10% of the total are asylum seekers and illegal immigrants that have been caught. It is this last group that cause many people to get bent out of shape and economically they're right - this group usually have poor or no English and few employment prospects and cost taxpayer money to keep. Many also have severe physical and mental health problems so they will be a net drain on UK resources. It's at this point that someone has to balance the economic issues with the moral and ethical issues.
Going back to my original statement the problem I have with immigration reporting is that it fails to add context. All I saw were headlines of net migration soars to 672,000 and photos of small boats laden with immgrants and people who should know better saying it was out of control. Students and their families have contributed around 150,000 to the immigratioin total on average through the 2010s - this fell dramatically during COVID and so the 230,000 extra students this year is pretty much all down to those who delayed their study. COVID, Ukraine and Hong Kong are one-off events, not ongoing situations and if you take these people and the increase in students out of the numbers as a blip, net immigration was 350,000. That's still a high number but 150,000 of this number arrived on Health and Care visas introduced in 2020 to address chronic shortages in those sectors.
This is turrning into a rant so II'll finish by saying I find it dishonest for broadcasters to make sensationalist headlines about a million people coming into the UK and implying it's an invasion of small boats when this is only 40,000 people out of 1,000,000 and the other 960,000 are here at our government's invitation to fix our academic funding and health and social care manpower issues.
Data from
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulation ... of%20total,)%20and%20British%20(84%2C000).
