The Migration Watch think tank has called on the UK government to impose a hard annual cap on legal net migration of less than 100,000 to alleviate significant social pressures and prevent Britain from devolving into a “fractured society”.
The call comes as Britain gears up for a general election, which will determine the composition of the next government in July. While polling shows migration levels are ever-more of a concern for voters in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, in the United Kingdom the legacy parties which either openly or cryptically promote mass migration still manage to dominate the political sphere.
Conservative party figures such as Boris Johnson told the public that leaving the European Union would allow the UK to “take back control” of its borders, but actually his liberal immigration reforms which opened up access to millions more migrants have resulted in record levels of immigration. Johnson’s post-Brexit reforms were supposedly modelled off the Australian points-based system, however, unlike Down Under, the nominally Conservative government refused to impose a cap on the number of immigrants allowed in per year.
Predictably, this saw net immigration surging to a record high of 467,000 in 2021 and rising further to 745,000 in 2022. Figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) for 2023 published today show that net migration remained in the high hundreds of thousands.
The ONS has previously predicted that if immigration continues to remain at high levels, the UK population will grow by over six million people as a result of foreign arrivals.
To reduce the strain that mass migration has placed on social cohesion, public services, the housing market, and elsewhere the Migration Watch think tank called for the government to impose an annual cap on net migration of 100,000 or less, which is exactly what the Conservatives promised in their 2010 manifesto when they first took power.
In comments provided to Breitbart London, Migration Watch UK Chairman Alp Mehmet said: “We have seen the immense damage caused by decades of uncapped migration under successive governments. Conservative ministers abandoned the Coalition immigration cap and, as a result, totally lost control of our borders.
“Our country is already developing serious social strains. The only way forward is now to introduce a cap. We must drive net migration below 100,000 a year. Our message is clear: no cap, no control.”
The think tank said that the impact of mass migration on housing and public services has already been “huge”, noting that 15 cities the size of Birmingham would need to be created to deal with the population growth driven by immigration, or in other words approximately 6,700 schools, 2,600 GP surgeries, and 8,000 miles of road by 2046. Additionally, the country would need to build more than half a million homes per year.
However, the social cost of allowing in millions of foreigners may be even higher, Migration Watch suggested, arguing that “too many new arrivals are not assimilating into British culture or accepting British values.”
The think tank pointed to a recent survey, which found that nearly half of British Muslims sympathise with the Islamist Hamas terrorists behind the October 7th attacks on Israel and a third of British Muslims support Sharia law being imposed in the UK.
“British society is founded upon the shared heritage, values, rich history, and culture of the British people. Its future stability, economic well-being and cohesion are dependent on manageable levels of immigration which now drive unprecedented population growth,” Migration Watch said.
“Massive levels of immigration from disparate parts of the world, if left unchecked, will result in a fractured society and increasing tensions between different religious and cultural groups, many from conflict-ridden parts of the world.”
Polling has found that the idea of placing a cap on annual net migration of 100,000 is broadly popular with the British public, with a survey conducted by Stack Data Strategy finding that 80 per cent of Britons want immigration below 100,000 and half of respondents preferring immigration to be under 10,000 per year.
The Tories previously promised to cut the number of legal immigrants to the tens of thousands in their 2010, 2015, and 2017 election manifestos, and said that immigration would “come down” in Boris Johnson’s 2019 manifesto. Yet, these promises to the public were all broken, almost certainly a commanding factor in the party’s plunging approval ratings.
In 2017, David Cameron’s former right-hand man George Osbourne admitted that the party never intended to reduce migration and that behind closed doors, party leadership had never agreed with the promises made to the public.
In defiance of the overwhelming public opposition to mass migration, the deceptively-named Conservative government has steadfastly refused to impose meaningful limits on legal immigration, with figures such as finance chief Jeremy Hunt continuing to argue that mass migration is necessary for economic growth, despite mounting evidence undercutting the alleged economic benefits of unfettered immigration.