Just weeks after the Conservatives left office with record-high levels of immigration, and years after Brexiteers voted to “take back control” of Britain’s borders, the latest round of Tory leadership hopefuls are promising to reduce immigration levels all over again.
The six leadership rivals have been queuing up to condemn the Party’s performance on immigration during their fourteen years in government.
Robert Jenrick, one of the six running to lead the Party, admitted in a video on X that he was “unable to deport” the “dangerous people coming into our country” while he served as Rishi Sunak’s minister for immigration from October 2022 to December 2023. Instead, he signalled that he would campaign to end mass migration and deport “anyone who comes here illegally within days.”
Jenrick’s opponent Tom Tugendhat has been even more brutal in his assessment of the Conservative legacy on immigration. Since he announced his leadership bid, he has called on his Party to “recognise where we failed… we’d say we cut immigration, it went up. We let people down. We lost their trust.” The former security minister has warned he is prepared to leave the European Court of Human Rights if the court “doesn’t serve our interests” when it comes to his plan to control immigration.
Since the UK officially left the EU at the end of January 2020, with a new immigration scheme being introduced that year, and after four Conservative manifestos pledging to drastically cut immigration, net migration into the country reached an all-time high of 745,000 in 2022. The figure hit 685,000 for 2023. Despite the plan to deport illegal migrants and asylum seekers to Rwanda being first announced in April 2022, small boat crossings across the English Channel reached almost 30,000 in 2023 and are on track to be even higher this year.
The architect of this very points-based immigration system and the Rwanda plan that has failed to deter legal and illegal migrants from coming to the UK, Priti Patel, is also fighting to win the Tory leadership on a platform to tackle immigration. Alongside her is James Cleverly, who continued in vain to get flights to Rwanda off the ground when he took over at the Home Office.
The six Tory leadership hopefuls are yet to lay out just why immigration rose after Brexit and the numerous government initiatives aimed at bringing the numbers down. Here, we outline a few reasons why their ‘pulling up the drawbridge’ approach has been one of the most self-defeating exercises in British political history.
The border restrictions that resulted from the end of freedom of movement in 2020 pushed many European migrants into permanent settlement in the UK. Through the EU settlement scheme, the government permitted European citizens living in the UK before Brexit, and their family members, to continue living in the country. The programme has seen 6.6 million people granted settled or pre-settled status and net immigration has increased as return emigration rates to the EU have dropped.
Meanwhile, the evidence suggests that the end of freedom of movement created a labour shortage of over 300,000. The UK has had to plug the gap by lowering the entry requirements for non-European workers. Take NHS nurses, for example, where the share of nurses with non-British nationalities has increased from 20 per cent to 45 per cent from 2017 to 2022. The cap on the number of Seasonal Worker visas allocated has also been raised year-on-year since 2019. As it is more difficult for these migrants from further afield to come to the UK, they are more likely to stay once they arrive, which further pushes up net migration.
Accordingly, the vast majority of immigrants into the UK are coming from countries outside of the European Union. Close to half are migrants coming to work, particularly in the health and social care sector, and their dependents. Indeed, the number of Skilled Worker visas granted doubled from 2021 to 2022.
The numbers of non-EU nationals living in the UK have also been fuelled by student migration. A record 484,000 study visas were issued in 2022, more than double the average number granted during the Tories’ first 10 years in power. The government only has themselves to blame for this rise; their International Education Strategy wanted to reach 600,000 international students by 2030 and they introduced the Graduate Visa in 2020, allowing students to live and work in the UK for two years after graduating.
From January 2024, the Conservative government clamped down on the provision of visas for the dependents of international students, which had provided over 100,000 visas in 2022. Nonetheless, the Graduate Visa route has allowed roughly a third of international students to remain in the UK after they have finished their course of study in the country.
While the Conservatives have battled net immigration, they have also opened routes to help bring vulnerable individuals around the world to the UK. The government opened a visa scheme for Ukrainians after Russia’s invasion of the country, allowing over 230,000 to flee to the UK in 2022, with another 50,000 following suit in 2023. The visa route for those in Hong Kong with a British National (Overseas) passport has seen over 200,000 come to the UK since 2021, while the government programme to resettle at-risk current or former staff in Afghanistan has allowed over 35,000 people to escape the Taliban.
Brexit is the first piece in the puzzle to understanding why small boat crossings have skyrocketed in recent years. While in the European Union, the UK benefitted from the Dublin III Regulation, which allowed the government to return asylum seekers to the first European country they arrived in. Although only 263 individuals were removed through this scheme in 2019, out of 1843 who arrived that year, it was arguably an effective deterrent to the people smugglers. Boris Johnson secured no replacement returns agreement in his Brexit deal and Channel crossings soared to 28,556 in the first whole year outside of the EU.
Priti Patel’s answer to the end of the Dublin III Regulation was the plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, however it never acted as a credible deterrent to refugees or their smugglers. Unlike EU nations, Rwanda was not, in the eyes of the Supreme Court, a safe country to send vulnerable asylum seekers. It took until 2024, thousands of crossings later, for the government to use legislation to dictate that Rwanda was indeed safe.
The legal hurdles faced by successive Conservative Home Secretaries were not the only reason many asylum seekers were undeterred in their plight to come to the UK. The plan itself only provided for 300 migrants to be initially transferred to the African nation, a negligible 1 per cent of the 29,000 who reached the English shores in 2022.
The Rwanda plan also failed as a deterrent to refugees and migrants because many would not have known about it in the first place. Evidence suggests that as many as two-thirds of prospective asylum seekers arriving in Italy know little about the potential sanctions awaiting them in Europe. Often it is just the profit-focused people smugglers who control the destination of the migrants, with disregard for the risks that await them.
Wrangling over the Supreme Court aside, the Conservatives plan for asylum seekers did not address the causes pushing thousands of people to move across continents to Europe and the UK. The main incentives for these desperate forms of migration, such as poverty, conflict or oppression, have been overlooked by a Tory government that cut foreign aid spending from 0.7 per cent to 0.5 per cent while Sunak was Chancellor.
The new Labour government promptly scrapped the Rwanda plan after coming into office, and the country waits to see if Channel crossings will go up or down.
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