Net migration has decreased from 649,000 to 204,000 in the year to June 2025

Is it people with citizenship returning?

The younger people going is down to jobs and opportunities. That’s gov policy having an impact. It’s better to attract skills than lose them.

and more seeking asylum

the figures wont show the whole story

its students surely?

The graph below says younger are leaving bed older returning? Scroll back

So you’re really only concerned about what colour people are coming or going - not the numbers 🙄

It’s students -wherei live is a low scoring uni. Many students from east mainly have finished their masters and after failing to find a job at the required income are leaving. They are given ? A year to find a job and now leaving.
Shame really but someone with a Bangladeshi degree and a masters from ton pot UK uni doesn’t have much chance.

It would be interesting seeing the makeup of the over 65s. I know several people whose long retired British parents are returning from Spain/France due to ill health/needing care and finding it hard to cope when they haven't learned the local language.

I'm sorry but I must push back on this.

It is a problem for a country if there is a significant, very rapid shock to the ethnic and cultural makeup of a country. The levels we are talking about are unprecedented in history for a peacetime situation. Any parallels you can make are to countries that ended up with ongoing, long-term, violent ethnic tensions.

This is added to concerns people have about the pure fiscal contribution of recent migration waves which is very negative on average, and particularly so if you look at a country-by-country level. This is the majority of concerns in this thread by the way. That it is economic insanity to run an immigration programme which brings in hundreds of thousands a year of future state dependents.

I'm sorry but referring to this as "Great Replacement Theory" is a lazy way to shut down debate on one of the most serious issues facing this country. It is a rhetorical trick to tie legitimate concerns to a strawman version of "~a shadowy cabal is deliberately trying to wipe out the white race!!" to try to make people uncomfortable about discussing it.

I've had enough of this copy-and-paste talking point.

The figures showing those aged 65 or older entering the UK are depressing. They are also going to be taking far more than they will ever contribute. Surely we should have an age limit imposed on immigration.

We just left. I'm non EU but husband amd kids are British. Net migration -4. Well done?

Good to see the use of student visas has massively tapered off. Universities were making good money by offering a route to permanent stay and not from the quality of their courses.

The sad fact is the majority of people who leave the UK are skilled workers who will pay tax. They aren’t the people who take more than they contribute.
Off the top of my head the younger people I know who have moved abroad all wok full time in professional roles and don’t have children. You are hardly likely to get those who claim benefits with multiple children leaving the UK as they have too much to lose, plus where else will they get so many free handouts?
Those coming here will probably take more than they contribute especially when you factor in them bringing their families over here too.

Yes, "highest emigration since the 1920s" is a massive problem.

The last Tory government completely deserves all the blame they get for it. A few ministers towards the end did what they could to stem the flow but overall it was shocking how much they loosened.

People still think there is a requirement to advertise locally for example. That was removed.

People think there are meaningful minimum salaries (until a last-minute reform the minimum was essentially just minimum wage in some cases).

People think the payment work migrants make for NHS services covers the average usage. Again until a last-minute reform this was significantly below typical use.

People think work visas are for "skilled" work. For most of the "Boriswave" period the "skill level" was "passed high school" level and you could literally get a work visa to work in convenience stores, kebab shops, petrol stations etc. Which was widely abused in schemes to sponsor your mate or someone paying you on the side to make up for their wage.

It reads more like middle aged to retirement age are leaving in larger numbers. Is that really a problem? We’ve always exported large numbers of our citizens throughout the world. We appear to have a bottle neck of more senior people in many professions and lots of educated young who could move forwards career wise if there was room.

Not necessarily if high skill people are leaving and low skill people are arriving.

I gave up with even being bothered with it, along with the benefits, climate change, cost of living and everything else.
All we need now is conscription and ww3 that should top it off.

Policies they introduced after they opened the floodgates. The numbers are still unsustainable unless the cast majority of those migrants don’t extend their visas and go home. It’s only possible to have high levels of migration if there is high turnover. What we have at the moment is putting huge strain on the settled population, on their communities, the infrastructure they rely on and their cost of living. British citizens are perhaps the only people in the world having to compete in their home job market with an international level of competition. British nurses are unable to get jobs in the hospitals they trained in because Boris Johnson’s government gave the hospitals permission to recruit directly from overseas without advertising locally. He also gave permission for the immigrant nurses and caters to bring unlimited dependants. It’s a spelling situation and the only answer is to say that most work visas are non-renewable.

That sounds awful. I know that some of the genuine uni’s have much fewer international students since rules change. Also been some changes to post graduate. Son is in a graduate job and one of his fellow graduates is trying to do all his professional exams much faster so he meets criteria of extension of visa. There was quite a lot the tories did to reduce total numbers but of course the media won’t be shouting this from the rooftops. Saw the mail was focussing on the high percentage being asylum seekers, brushing over the big reduction. I am not a tory voter but these reductions are from policies they introduced.

No I’m sorry I don’t buy that you’re financially challenged because of the amount of tax you pay. On £200k you are not struggling. And if you are it is due to choices YOU made! You chose to take on a big house and mortgage, you chose to put kids in private education. You have so many choices and that is a hugely privileged position to be in.

Me too. I earned more than I ever have last year, almost 200k. I work like a dog for it though - mostly 14 hour days in a high pressure exacting environment. Clearly not on the breadline but equally I have never felt so challenged financially. We have been in the same house for 15 years and my mortgage is pretty much what it was a month when I earned £75k, but energy costs, rising council tax, necessary maintenance, outrageous food costs plus ever rising school fees and a narrative that I have the broadest shoulders and should contribute more. Well, I think I’m off to somewhere that rewards hard work and effort and I’m taking my tax contribution that I have made in spades over the last 25 years with me. The latest budget is the final nail in the coffin. We are governed by a bunch of incompetents and I cannot see how they are going to extricate us from this doom spiral. Wages are stagnant and there is no real growth. I want my children to experience growing up in an ambitious and expanding economy not one where people actively seek to cut their hours and productivity because tax rates mean it’s not worth working.

A lot of supermarkets won’t employ under 18s now and the shifts offered aren’t particularly helpful if you have to fit them around study or the times are unworkable eg a 4am start time. Most 18 yr olds won’t have their own car.

I know younger people are leaving. Youth unemployment isn’t as high as post financial crash and has been increasing since 05.

One issue is the jobs don’t exist anymore vs when I was young or the employees want too much or older adults are now doing the jobs as retirement ages are older. When I go to the supermarket or to eat out the staff are older.

Some probably deserve to. My friend’s half brother came over here from a developing country where I used to work, having been offered a ‘scholarship’ to a university. His family believed it was very prestigious when it wasn’t. They had to borrow a lot of money for him to come and then there were no British citizens on the course, the teaching was poor and there was very little contact time with the staff. They felt robbed. I felt cross that they’d been taken advantage of. Unfortunately they hadn’t asked my advice.

It’s younger people leaving. I didn’t realise youth unemployment was at 15%, that’s high.

I can see why there’s a pick up in threads on young adult dc struggling to get work.