Ten days ago, Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, vowed to take “back control of our borders,” warning that uncontrolled immigration could result in the country “becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.”
On Thursday, the government estimated that net migration had dropped by almost half in 2024 compared to 2023, to 431,000, suggesting that Britain’s recent period of soaring immigration was ebbing, and perhaps even coming to an end.
The gap between Mr. Starmer’s alarming language and the statistics underscored how rising populism, fueled in Britain by the politics of Brexit, has distorted the debate on immigration, sometimes leaving it strangely disconnected from the facts.
The sharp drop in net migration, which had been predicted, mainly reflected tighter measures on immigration put in place by the previous Conservative government, which had faced acute pressure to reduce a surge that began after Brexit.
Those same pressures are now bearing down on Mr. Starmer’s Labour government, which announced a raft of measures earlier this month to further tighten migration rules and make it harder for newcomers to stay permanently in the country.
“The previous government gave Starmer a present wrapped in a bow,” said Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, a research institute that specializes in migration and integration. “Having failed to meet their own targets for cutting migration, they managed to cut it back in time for him to take credit for it.”
Twice a year, the Office for National Statistics publishes estimates of the number of people who have arrived in Britain and those who have left. The difference between the two — the net migration number — has become a politically fraught indicator in the nearly nine years since Britain voted to leave the European Union.
After peaking at 906,000 in the 12 months from June 2022 to June 2023, net migration declined 20 percent to an estimated 728,000 in the year ending in June 2024.
The figure released on Thursday estimates net migration for the 12 months from January to December 2024, so it encompasses the first six months of Labour government. For the calendar year of 2023, net migration was estimated at 860,000.
The statistics office said the decline was driven by “reductions in people arriving on work- and study-related visas, and an increase in emigration over the 12 months to December 2024, especially people leaving who originally came on study visas once pandemic travel restrictions to the UK were eased.”
The previous government had tightened restrictions on students bringing family members to Britain when they enrolled at British universities. The statistics office estimated there was an 86 percent reduction in net arrivals of dependents of foreign students, the largest percentage decline of any group.
Mark Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom, as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.
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