Last Updated on May 31, 2023 by Karl Thompson
Net migration to the UK reached 600 000 in December 2022, up more than 50% since December 2018.
Since Brexit net migration from the EU has been declining, with around 50 000 more EU Citizens leaving the UK than entering; and the increase in net migration is driven entirely from non-EU countries, especially Nigeria, Bangladesh and India.
Reasons for Migration to the UK
The main reason for the recent increase in migration is more people coming to study in the UK, and much of that is driven by the dependent partners and children of students coming to join them.
After that, work is the main reason, with people coming in the take up jobs in sectors of our labour market where there are vacancies, such as health and social care and seasonal agricultural work.
2022 also saw more humanitarian sources of migration with more than 100 000 refugees come to the UK from the Ukraine and more from Hong Kong.
Analysis
Immigration is a sensitive political issue, with 60% of the UK population thinking it is too high according to YouGov tracking (2).
However it is also clear that we need immigration to fill gaps in the job market and a lot of the increase from 2021 to 2022 was about doing just that.
Also, very few people believe we took in too few refugees from Ukraine so people are not outright opposed to migration.
Finally, the figures are somewhat skewed by students coming the UK to study for three years, and bringing their dependents…. most of these will return home after study, and while they are here they are paying huge fees to British universities which should benefit the UK economy: they are basically paying to be here!
From a policy perspective, however, such levels of net migration to the UK are the highest on record, which suggests a profound failure of government policy given that every PM since 2010 has been elected on the promise of bringing net migration down, which simply hasn’t happened.
Relevance to A-level sociology
This material is primarily relevant to the demography topic, which is part of the families and households module.
Sources
Census UK (accessed May 2023) Long-term international migration, provisional: year ending December 2022
(2) YouGov: attitudes to immigration tracker.
