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

[ILoveHotChocolates]

I guess this won’t be shouted about in the news. Such a good thing

200k on balance leaving or arriving? What do we need it to be to offset the drop in birth rate and larger population that are older citizens?

arriving.

I highly doubt 400k people have left. So it’ll be a fall in immigration

What kind of people are leaving? I suspect that it’s tax paying professionals and Brits rather than men arriving on boats.

How many do we need? 200k sounds very small to me.

Are you sure? There are a significant proportion of people leaving… maybe not 400k, but I don’t know that.

I’d quite like to see the gross migration numbers.

Absolutely this

EU net migration was negative, estimated at -70,000 in the year ending June 2025. Most EU migration involved people with EUSS status who originally arrived with free movement rights before Brexit. British net migration was also negative, at -109,000. British net emigration increased in 2022 and 2023 but was largely stable over the past year. These negative figures brought the overall total down, despite non-EU net migration of 383,000, which is roughly double the levels seen shortly before Brexit in 2018 and 2019.

Taken from an article online.

So EU and British people are leaving which brings the overall figure down.

Non EU migration into the UK is double pre-Brexit figures. So the headline is a little misleading.

It's not 'a good thing' if professionals and skilled workers are emigrating and non-skilled workers are immigrating.

The net figure only tells a very small part of the story.

Changing the goalposts springs to mind

So actually according to the latest @ONS figures we have the single biggest outflow of people from this country in more than a century. According to the breakdown, the rise in emigration is primarily down to two things.
First, the departure of non-EU migrants (presumably many of whom came over in recent years).
But also, importantly, a higher-than-previously-estimated outflow of British citizens abroad. So if professinals and skilled people are leaving Vs unskilled migrants coming in, then it isn't a positive.

Changing the goalposts springs to mind

Quite.

Or just carping as default setting.

Are the migrants coming in unskilled? I think that’s a rather bold assumption. Surely many of them will be skilled professionals. Are we still receiving people from HK who were likely born British and highly motivated to rejoin?

Seemingly a significant portion of migrant workers are in lower-skilled occupations. In the UK, a 2023 analysis found that nearly 60% of foreign nationals were in jobs not in high skilled jobs, about 32% of EU migrants and 33% of non-EU migrants were in lower-middle-skill jobs like care workers or drivers.

So if we are losing doctors (which we are) and getting drivers then obviously that's an issue.

https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/briefing-paper/515/massive-recent-increase-in-lower-skilled-immigrant-workers

Why? Low skilled workers are still important.

Low skilled work could be done by some of the economically-inactive original population (or in some cases by increased automation).

The argument for high-skilled immigration is that they might have specific niche skills that are hard to replicate in the original population. Not the case for low-skilled work by definition.

When you search for jobs online there are loads of low skilled jobs. People don’t want to do them.

Yes they are but we shouldn't be importing low skilled workers when those jobs could be done by unemployed UK citizens.
Also higher skilled workers earn more = pay more tax.
So if you are losing higher tax payers and bring in workers who are low/no tax payers then that obviously impacts on the money available to fund the services those lower skilled workers use.

If we have UK citizens who currently aren't working then they should be mandated to do them. Just saying "no-one wants to do them" isn't acceptable when we have such a huge welfare bill that people who are working have to pay for.

It's not the achievement they think it is.

Net migration is both legal and illegal migration as well as how many people arrive and leave. Legal migration is much higher. Both types bring dependants over after spending some years siphoning money out of the system (innocently sending money back home) to their dependants while appealing to the Home Office to get them flown over to here.

We have plenty of narcissistic immigrants legal and not so legal who hate the sight of a St. George's Cross or Union flag and think that we should appreciate them for being here.

Perhaps net zero migration is what we should be aiming for; none in and all of the ones already here out.

As long as someone who arrives here does so legally and wants to integrate while also stipulating that they identify culturally a lot more with the flag of the country they've moved to, then I can accept that.

Yes, I expect a fair bit of flaming for this, but I'm too tired to care.

I know so many young doctors who have left for NZ Aus due to the lack of training places. And my 22 year old son’s friends are all seeking graduate jobs (research / engineering / geoscience) in Europe. More opportunities, lower cost of living, better public services. If there’s no prospect of getting a roof over your head here through hard work, why stay?

But are they in low skilled occupations because they aren’t able to practice till certified here or because they were low skilled anyway? If you (for example) work in the nhs you will be very aware of just how many medical and support staff are immigrants. Not that we don’t need labour at every level just it isn’t clear to me what is happening. I remember headlines that deaths exceeded births for the first time a few years ago. I think it was about 20k. Presumably we need a larger number of immigrants and more children now because the indigenous population is getting older and the country will need workers to keep going?

I am sure it will be shouted about, because the ONS are attributing it to restrictions introduced by the previous Conservative government 😂

No that was kind of a one off. It's a trickle now. Although some older HK'ers were obviously born under British rule, they didn't view themselves as British per se - that was just their passport (British Dependent Territory- so not even considered a citizen but a subject). The 100K+ out migration in 2022 was really a case of "any port in a storm" due to the NSL and covid restrictions rather than them feeling a cultural affinity to the UK.

Key word is net. There's bern a huge exodus of people leaving, generally wealthy high tax payers.