When Shabana Mahmood, Britain’s Home Secretary, announced restrictive new measures last week aimed at cracking down on legal immigration, she used dire language to bolster her case.
“The pace and scale of migration in this country has been destabilizing,” she said in a speech to Parliament. She warned of “unprecedented levels of migration in recent years” and vowed that with her new policies: “That will now change.”
In fact, it already has.
Official data released Thursday showed that net migration to Britain fell sharply in the 12 months leading up to June, to 204,000 people, down from the previous year’s total of 649,000.
Those numbers continue a downward trend in Britain. Net migration — the number of people who arrived, minus the number of people who left — almost halved in 2024, the result of tougher rules announced at the end of the previous Conservative government, and of changes in global migration patterns.
Overall, net migration to Britain has now plunged by almost 80 percent since its peak of nearly a million people in 2023.
“Long-term international net migration for the year ending June 2025 was around two-thirds lower than a year earlier,” according to Thursday’s report from the Office for National Statistics. The report said the drop was the result of fewer people “arriving for work- and study-related reasons and a continued, gradual increase in levels of emigration.”
Around 898,000 people moved to Britain over that year, compared to just under 1.3 million in the previous year, according to the report. About 693,000 people emigrated, including 286,000 people from outside the European Union, and 252,000 British nationals.
Ms. Mahmood is not the only politician in Britain whose fiery rhetoric does not entirely match the reality when it comes to migration.
Nigel Farage, the leader of the right wing populist Reform U.K. party and an ally of President Trump, has long made opposition to immigration his primary issue. He said recently that migrants were the primary reason that Britain is “not far away from major civil disorder,” citing what he called “an invasion” of young men.
And Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party, said in October that Britain was being “mugged” by waves of migrants arriving on small boats across the English Channel.
Britain’s political elites are focusing the public’s attention on migration in ways that are not always accurate, especially when it comes to describing the scale of the flow of people into the country, experts say.
That is helping to create a gap between how people perceive immigration in Britain and the facts.
An analysis of British public opinion on immigration released this week found that more than half of those polled thought immigration had increased in the last year. And only 16 percent expected the number of overall migrants to be lower within a year.
The report — produced by British Future, a London-based think tank, and by the Ipsos survey company — concluded that public debate had not caught up with the dramatic reduction in the number of migrants coming to the country.
“Falling immigration is the biggest secret in British society,” said Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, which specializes in migration and integration.
Mr. Katwala said in an interview that immigration had jumped after the Covid pandemic, partly because of a post-Brexit loosening of visa requirements for skilled workers introduced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
“Everybody, I think, knows that we had record immigration in the last parliament,” Mr. Katwala said. “But almost nobody knows about the scale of these falls afterward. So we’re having a political debate and a public debate with this very big lag effect, at least in terms of the perceptions of what was actually happening.”
Mr. Katwala said that public attitudes had been shaped by the news media and politicians’ focus on narrow parts of the immigration system, especially ones that indicate a lack of government control.
That includes migrants claiming asylum after arriving in Britain on small boats. Those landings are headline-grabbing, but the people who come ashore represent less than half of asylum claims each year.
The number of migrants claiming asylum did rise from 81,000 to 96,000 in the year ending in June 2025, with most claimants coming from Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Albania. Ms. Mahmood announced much tougher conditions for refugees this month in an attempt to make Britain less attractive to asylum seekers.
But asylum claimants represented only about 11 percent of overall immigrants into the country.
Even if the government communicated the fall in overall migration more clearly, some members of the public might not change their minds.
In the report produced by British Future, about one in five Britons refused to acknowledge that migration had fallen, even when presented with the official data. Those numbers were even higher — one in three — among members of Reform U.K., Mr. Farage’s populist party.
“This ‘post-truth’ conviction in the face of official figures is worrying for the future of the immigration debate in the U.K., if some people choose to disregard statistics that do not correlate with their beliefs,” the report concluded.
Michael D. Shear is a senior Times correspondent covering British politics and culture, and diplomacy around the world.
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