The number of “permanent migrants” travelling to the United Kingdom soared by over 50 per cent in the last year, and it now takes more migrants a year than any other high-income country on earth except the United States.
A new assessment of global migration trends by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the club of developed Western-style economies finds the United Kingdom topped the list for mass migration growth from 2022 to 2023, with the number of permanent migrants arriving “soaring” a colossal 52.9 per cent. The number of arrivals rose from 488,400 in 2022 to 746,900 last year.
UK arrivals were 100 per cent higher in 2023 than 2019, the year before the coronavirus lockdowns.
The OECD defines permanent migrants as those likely to settle in their new nation long term and so does not count Ukrainian refugees in these figures or students, even though in the British example it has been the case large-scale student via fraud has produced a black-market back door to residency. Family migration is revealed by the report to be the largest source of permanent arrivals and accounted for over double the number of people moving than labour migration for work.
While the United Kingdom saw the greatest growth in migrant arrivals overall, a third of OECD nations also experienced growth. Yet the magnitude of the rise in other states truly buttresses the remarkable character of the UK’s ‘Conservative’ party open borders era, with the United States under President Joe Biden seeing a 13.4 per cent increase, and the German left-wing progressive coalition presiding over just 3.5 per cent growth.
OECD members as a whole saw permanent type migration increase 10 per cent in 2023 over 2022, “already a record year”.
The United States, in absolute terms, took the most permanent migrants at 1.2 million in 2023. Yet the comparatively small United Kingdom with 2.5 per cent of the landmass of the United States and 20 per cent of the population, still managed to take the second highest number of arrivals in 2023.
In a moment of remarkable synchronicity, the OECD study on soaring immigration to the UK was published within hours of the latest GDP figures for the country, which showed growth absolutely stagnant at 0.1 per cent in the third quarter of 2024. The juxtaposition of the two figures once again underlines the enormous degree to which the liberal orthodoxy that mass migration is a perquisite for economic growth has been absolutely debunked.
While the last UK Conservative government always talked a tough game on border control, when it came to actually governing the arguments of the treasury always won out, seeing its administrations throw the borders open to record levels of migration. This was very much justified — although the Tories didn’t like talking about it if they could avoid it, given how it plays with their own voters — as the economy being liable to collapse without bottomless arrivals.
The Daily Telegraph notes Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage particularly spoke to this point, needling the dogmatically pro-migration Westminster establishment to say: “In six of the last eight quarters, where levels of legal migration were [at] record [levels] in the history of these islands, GDP per capita went down. Mass immigration is making us poorer.
“If you are a large employer, a big multinational, that is great. For everybody else, that is not working at any level.”
