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 era of soaring immigration, far from worsening, was gradually coming to an end.
The gap between Mr. Starmer’s alarming language and the numbers underscored how rising populism, fueled in Britain by the politics of Brexit, has twisted 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 faced acute pressure to reduce a surge that began after Brexit.
While the numbers have dropped, some of those same public 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.”
Still, he said, it will be hard for Mr. Starmer to shake a deep-rooted public perception that immigration is still spiraling out of control.
Even as the influx of legal migrants has declined, the Home Office reported that the number of people claiming asylum in the year ending March 2025 hit a record high: 109,000. About a third of those came on small boats that crossed the English Channel, a perilous journey that has become a stark symbol of Britain’s failure to control its borders, as well as an easy target for right-wing critics.
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. That was still high enough to pose a political problem for the Conservatives, who had long promised to bring down the number of arrivals.
The figure released on Thursday estimates net migration from January to December 2024, so it encompasses the first six months of Labour government. For all of 2023, net migration was estimated at 860,000.
The statistics office said the decline was driven by fewer people arriving on work and study visas, alongside an increase in emigration — especially of people leaving who originally came on study visas, and had stayed longer than expected because of pandemic travel restrictions.
The last government announced in 2023 that it would tighten restrictions on students bringing family members to Britain when they enrolled at universities. The statistics office estimated there was an 86 percent reduction in net arrivals of foreign students’ dependents in 2024, the largest percentage decline of any group.
The decline also reflected tighter enforcement of rules on foreigners who come to work in Britain’s social care sector. Though migrants fill much-needed gaps in the National Health Service, the sprawling social-care network, which includes those who care for elderly people, has been exploited by some recruitment agencies.
If current trends continue, net migration is projected to level out at around 300,000 people a year. Though that is somewhat higher than before Brexit, some economists say Britain could comfortably absorb it. They contend that high levels of immigration have been wrongly blamed for other policy failures, like chronic underinvestment in public services or sluggish economic growth.
“The debate has been absolutely terrible,” said Jonathan Portes, an economics professor at Kings College London. “Politicians are either explicitly or implicitly blaming immigration for things it has demonstrably not caused.”
Asylum seekers pose a different problem. While migrants on small boats have historically constituted a small fraction of the overall migration numbers, they would account for a greater share if the government is unable to curb that traffic. This guarantees, experts say, that the small boats will remain a flashpoint.
The government played up its success in deporting failed asylum seekers and immigration offenders, saying the number returned was 12 percent higher in the year ended in March 2025 than in the prior 12-month period.
“Through close collaboration with partners like Albania, we are stepping up our efforts to return those with no right to be in the U.K. to their countries of origin,” David Lammy, the foreign secretary, said in a statement.
The government has hardened its tone on immigration in part to fend off the threat posed by Reform U.K., an insurgent anti-immigrant party led by Nigel Farage. Mr. Farage said on social media on Thursday that the new statistics were “not as high as the great Tory betrayal, but still a disaster.”
Public concern about immigration, which had receded in the aftermath of Brexit, has ticked up again because of the small-boats crisis, according to pollsters.
Immigration experts argue that with net migration falling, the government should try to edge the debate away from numbers and toward a more balanced discussion of what Britain is trying to achieve through its immigration policy. But they concede that will be hard to do, as long as newspapers carry alarming photos of rickety boats washing up on beaches along England’s southern coast.
“It is small-boats numbers that seem to be driving public perceptions and attitudes about immigration,” said Christabel Cooper, director of research at Labour Together, a think tank associated with the Labour Party.
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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