Legal immigration in UK a volatile issue for PM Sunak

Boom replenishing labour force, but strategy a rude shock for those who voted for Brexit

LONDON - Inflammatory warnings from politicians. Knife-edge votes in Parliament. A looming election against a backdrop of national crisis. Britain's ruling Conservative Party has been caught up in a clamorous debate over deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda, which has at times sounded like a not-so-distant echo of Brexit.

Yet for all the fury it has generated, the Rwanda plan is little more than a sideshow in the surprising story of immigration in post-Brexit Britain. While refugees who make hazardous crossings of the English Channel in rickety boats pose a humanitarian challenge, they constitute a fraction less than 5 per cent of the number of people who immigrate to the country legally every year.

Far from closing its borders, Britain has thrown them open since voting in 2016 to leave the European Union. And as the coronavirus pandemic has subsided, legal immigration has exploded. Net legal migration - the number of people who arrived minus those who left reached nearly 750,000 people in 2022. That is more than double the number in the year before the Brexit referendum.

Immigration is replenishing Britain's labour force and deepening the diversity of its cities - a deliberate, if largely unspoken, strategy that has come as a rude shock to people who voted for Brexit on the promise that it would make the country's borders less porous. And that has made it a volatile political issue for the Conservative Party, which played on fears of a foreign influx to propel the Brexit campaign, only to find itself presiding over a new era of mass legal migration.

"The Brexit Betrayal Is Now Complete," said a headline in The Daily Telegraph, a normally proTory newspaper, after the latest figures were released.

Ms Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, said "there is a sort of left-hand, right-hand issue" with immigration.