Immigration - can someone please explain it to me in simple terms?

MN gets confused by multiple link previews so here is also a video showing projected changes in the world demographics. I think we have a tendency in the West to assume that we are the majority, but demographically, that has not been the case for some time. (The video is from 2012 which is why he quotes the world population as 7 billion. Today it is 8 billion.)

https://www.gapminder.org/videos/where-do-people-live/

I absolutely agree. Although not exactly the same because the Brits who are "ex pats" are not draining housing, dentist, school systems in Spain are they??

My issue is that we simply can't manage any longer it's not that I don't want people in UK fron this particular country... it's not that. There'd a housing crisis I actually wonder what my DC generation will do it's worrying!

UK infrastructure and public services are incredibly stretched and struggle to serve the population due to either a lack of investment, or population growth (the end result is the same whichever way you look at this).

Population growth is mostly inevitable and a worldwide pattern which has already been set in motion (starting with the postwar baby boom) and will not stabilise until approximately 2080. There is more info about this here: https://ourworldindata.org/demographic-transition

However, the UK does also (currently) gain more than it loses from migration (ie, more people move to the UK than move out of the UK). Because the birth/death rate in the UK is currently fairly equal and predicted to invert (death rate will rise higher than birth rate) migration is now a MUCH higher source of population growth than births/deaths.

Therefore some people think that it would be better if we had less immigration, in order to slow population growth and therefore relieve pressure on services.

An opposing argument is that since population growth has been happening for 70+ years and it was extremely clear and easy to predict, there ought to have been more long term planning and investment into public services and infrastructure so that they could cope with the numbers of people they are meant to serve, regardless of immigration. It serves political parties (who may have been the ones failing to plan and fund these things) to "blame" a third party e.g. immigrants. A group who are easy to scapegoat anyway because humans are essentially naturally primed towards suspicion of people we feel are different from us. We have to actively work (or have a lot of contact with people from different cultures) to overcome this kind of bias - it's thought to be a sort of protective instinct from a time when we lived in much smaller groups or tribes.

Also, it looks really simple when you look at pure numbers of births/deaths vs immigration - why not just close that gate and then our population won't expand any more? But the reality is more complicated; our population is ageing and retired people use more in terms of public services than they currently pay in tax. Whereas immigrants are usually young and healthy. We need more people of working age in order to do the jobs involved in this kind of thing and also so that they will pay tax on their earnings and purchases. And the world population is still expanding, although it is now slowing down and will eventually stabilise, but what we will see over the next decades is a lot of migration because the poorer countries are having their demographic shift later than we have had it in the West, so there are simply more people in the world and some of them will look to move around to different places.

I’m descended from an illegal immigrant who came over on a boat but he was white and he assimilated himself into the local population in 1800 with everyone in the UK that has the same surname is related to me.

There’s a lot that needs unpicking.

My worry was that until relatively recently, quite a significant proportion of migrants were dependents. So you might have a careworker coming and earning quite a low wage, not especially highly skilled, not paying much tax, bringing two young children. That family will need school places, healthcare for 3, could be eligible for child benefit & child elements of UC including housing elements.

Or a "student" bringing their family over.

We don't have enough housing as it is. Plus bringing people to this country to work in lower skilled, lower wage healthcare roles just suppresses the wages in those sectors which hurts our existing workforce.

The narrative has been for a while that immigration is all about people arriving via boat to claim asylum. Under the last government we allowed a million people in legally...

It was only a few hundred anyway over a year. And we took more than sent back.

Journalist? Looking for ‘soundbites’?

The problem for Labour is this.

I'm not against immigration. Zero immigration would be a disaster. But I think the numbers are too high.... Immigration at over a million per annum , resulting in net migration of about 750k last year I think...my number one concern about immigration is housing. We have a serious housing crisis which is crippling peoples finances and is seriously detrimental to our quality of life.

Primarily because Boris Johnson introduced changes that made it easier for people to come here on student and work visas.

I'm ethnically Indian myself. Early 30s, parents moved over and then had me here. And I myself do agree that there is a problem with immigration. And it should be massively cut. I live in a very unintegrated area where people can't even speak English. My primary school year group only had 2 white kids!

There are legitimately some parts of London where it feels like you're not in the UK.

Economically it may or may not be beneficial. But my main issue is the societal and cultural impacts.

I think people worry when undocumented people just rock up here, in rubber boats, across the Channel. 1100 yesterday.

All have to be housed somewhere, and provided with other services.

Unless the main parties get hold of this, Reform will gain more power.🤷‍♀️

The mumsnet,Demographic tends to be very middle class so a,lot of immigrants your average mumsnetter will meet will.be educated and in a profession ,it's all very well sitting in your detached four bedroom house calling others thick for not wanting unlimited immigration ,when it's not your local services ,children's schools etc that are affected by
This is partly the reason why people voted for Brexit,in the first place but rather than,listen to.peoples concerns about
Some people would rather shout thick ,racist etc.

Nail on the head. Excellent summary.

The scale of immigration we've seen recently is unprecented.

Post-covid total net migration has been about 2 million people. We've added two Birminghams worth of people to our population in the space of about 4 years.

Dealing with it is very difficult without having a big impact either on the economy or on what people expect to be able to do.

for example, foreign students at U.K. universities are counted in the immigration figures. These students pay massive fees to U.K. universities which help subsidize U.K. students. If you try to reduce the number of students you get universities having less money and then they close whole departments and potentially you run the risk of a whole university going bankrupt.

if you say that farm workers cannot come in then vegetables literally rot in the field because farmers cannot get people to pick them. (There is now a year by year scheme for agricultural workers).

etc etc

Immigration is when people from other countries come to the UK.

historically there have been waves of immigration into the U.K. - eg in 1685 and beyond many many French Protestants left France for the UK and other Protestant countries.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Fontainebleau

more recently after the Second World War the government encouraged immigrants to move to the U.K. because we had a massive labour shortage. I grew up in Lancashire and many Pakistani people moved there in the late 40s and early 50s to work at the Cotton mills.

at the time commonwealth citizens had the right to live and work in the UK so strictly speaking they were British citizens born abroad who moved to the UK rather than immigrants. A lot also came from the carribean - the wind rush generation

What is Windrush Day? https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43782241

in 1981 British nationality was redefined by the British Nationality Act and citizens of current and former colonies such as Jamaica, Pakistan etc were now considered mostly not British citizens.

Immigration stayed pretty steady through the 80s and started going up in the 90s.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/283287/net-migration-figures-of-the-united-kingdom-y-on-y/

the big changes came with free movement in the EU in the early 2000s when many people from Eastern Europe (Poland etc) moved to Britain.

since Brexit many of the EU citizens who were here have left and immigration has gone up massively and is now mostly from non-EU states such as India and Pakistan.

why people don’t like immigration:
it can put a massive amount of pressure on local government services in a particular area and government isn’t always good at meeting that need.
for example many schools in the fens had an influx of polish children when free movement started who spoke no English at all. There was no support from government for these children, schools just had to do their best with random 11 year olds who had no English.
Immigrants tend to cluster together where there are already people from their country (for obvious reasons). If you are English and your village switches very quickly to being a place where many people speak Romanian or similar and no English it can feel alienating
economically there is an argument that high immigration keeps wages low because there are more people around to do the jobs.
there are concerns about some of the cultures that immigrants are coming from - some asylum seekers in particular almost be definition will come from places of extreme violence and significant cultural differences (for example Afghanistan) and they may find it difficult to adjust to English cultural norms.

why people like immigration:
polish builders are amazing
immigrants mostly do jobs British people can’t or won’t eg veg picking and harvesting
the UK has always been a multicultural society and the skills and experiences immigrants have brought have enriched it - eg Notting Hill carnival, Birmingham Mela, etc.

Renting has never been more unaffordable.

I imagine those who pay tax should be aware of the benefits to 'foreigners'.
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/05/30/benefits-foreigners-near-cost-1bn-month/

The use of hotels for asylum seekers means a lot for the local tourist economy. It's good for the individual hotel but for tourists it probably means the cost of hotels is pushed up. It probably has a knock on effect on the impact of tourism, but I don't think I've seen research on that.
When they are given permission to remain they then can get benefits. The ones who don't get given permission stay away but are supported in other ways, and perhaps keep some of the black market economy going.

The asylum seekers who have come via other visas but decide they want to stay, also has an impact on the UK.

We need more reservoirs, more power generation, more housing, more hospital appointments, more GP appointments, more dental appointments.

There's a thread about the UK medical staff being unable to get places as they are not being offered jobs because migrants are.

How does any more migration help any of this?

Are you an immigrant OP? Or do you live in some rural backwater? If not then I'm not sure how you could have reached adulthood without being able to conceive why mass, unprecedented levels of immigration may be causing issues, or why people personally exposed to these issues, wish it wasn't happening.

Brexit made it impossible for the UK to send asylum seekers back to a European country. We are paying France millions to patrol their borders now and still we are getting asylum seekers in record numbers. It has got to stop.