Race and space: the rise and fall of “net migration”

Jonathan Portes asks how useful a measure immigration statistics are and argues that they have served to legitimate politics of racialised grievance. 

The BBC headline for last week’s immigration statistics was “UK migration drops to 171,000 – almost half 2024’s figure.” Of course, it referred to net migration – taking it for granted that that, above all, was the key statistic.

But net migration is not immigration. It is immigration minus emigration. It can fall because fewer people come to Britain, or because more people leave. These are very different things. A country in which young people, graduates, nurses, doctors, scientists or entrepreneurs are leaving in large numbers may not have solved a problem, but acquired one.

This is not a technical quibble. The latest figures make the point. Net migration has indeed fallen sharply: from a peak of 944,000 in the year to March 2023 to 171,000 in the year to December 2025. But this conceals large movements in both directions. The ONS estimates that net migration of British nationals was minus 136,000, and net migration of EU+ nationals was minus 42,000, while non-EU+ net migration remained positive at about 350,000.

So net migration is doing a lot of work here – arguably too much. If the concern is population growth, it is a reasonable, though incomplete, indicator. If the concern is “control”, it is less useful. And if the concern is that British people are leaving while non-white migrants are arriving, it is the wrong measure altogether.

That distinction matters because the British fixation on net migration – and it is British; most other countries, even those equally obsessed with immigration politics, pay relatively little attention to this particular number – was not inevitable. It was constructed, socially and politically. It emerged in its modern form in the mid-2000s, and was then institutionalised by the Conservative Party after 2010. The statistic became central not because it was the best way to understand migration, but because it was politically convenient.

The key political move was made by the anti-immigration lobby group Migration Watch, which shaped the Conservative Party’s approach. Its 2005 briefing, “UK population increase through migration”, framed the issue not primarily as one of race, ethnicity or culture, but as one of population pressure. Similarly, other briefings claimed that England was, after Malta, the most densely populated country in Europe.

This was effective because it was respectable. Britain was a “small crowded island”. The problem was not foreigners, still less non-white foreigners, but simply numbers: pressure on housing, congestion, public services, GP appointments, schools and transport.

There are legitimate policy questions here. Population change does affect housing demand and infrastructure. But that was not all that was going on. The “small crowded island” argument allowed anti-immigration politics to be presented as technocratic rather than ethnic. It translated anxieties about belonging and identity into a language of arithmetic.

David Cameron then turned this into a target. In January 2010 he said that he wanted net immigration reduced to the “tens of thousands” rather than the “hundreds of thousands”, and that net immigration of 200,000 a year was “too much”. The context was explicitly demographic: he also said he wanted to keep the UK population below 70 million. At a time when Cameron was emphasising the socially liberal turn of the Conservative Party, net migration offered a way of talking about immigration while avoiding more overtly racial or ethnonationalist language.

That mattered in the 2000s. Open racism was still largely taboo in mainstream politics. The BNP existed, but mainstream politicians did not want to sound like the BNP. So the language of race was displaced into the language of space, pressure and pace of change. Net migration was the perfect statistic for this purpose.

But the euphemism was always unstable. Some on the restrictionist side were more candid. Paul Collier wrote – falsely, under any definition other than an explicitly race-based one – that the 2011 census showed that “the indigenous British had become a minority in their own capital”, and later defended the phrase as “a perfectly meaningful statement”. David Goodhart’s argument about “Somewheres” and “Anywheres” was a more sophisticated version of the same move: not crudely racial, but clearly concerned with the cultural and demographic position of the majority population.

But these euphemisms are now no longer necessary; the masks are off. Migration Watch now warn that the “native [that is, white] British” are becoming a minority, while Goodhart asks if London can remain the capital of the UK if it isn’t white enough.

And, just as in the 2000s, politicians have followed. Robert Jenrick, while still a Conservative Shadow Cabinet member, said that he “didn’t see another white face” and that this was not the country he wanted to live in; he later insisted the issue was integration, not “the colour of your skin or your faith”. This is not exactly plausible deniability. His new Reform colleague Matt Goodwin is more straightforwardly racist, saying that the fall in net migration just means that white Britons are being “replaced” by Afghan goatherders.

This is where the fixation on net migration becomes contradictory. If the problem is net migration, then a fall should be welcome. That is the logic of the statistic. But if the problem is that British people are leaving while non-white migrants are arriving, net migration is not the right measure. Indeed, it conceals the thing that the new right wants to talk about. For those whose politics is increasingly about replacement, that is precisely the problem.

The old language of net migration remains. It is too embedded in the machinery of British politics to disappear quickly. Governments need targets. Newspapers need numbers. Opposition parties need simple attack lines. But the emotional centre of the debate has moved. The increasingly explicit concern is not just how many people come, but who comes, who leaves, and who counts as part of the nation.

This is also why falling net migration has not depoliticised immigration. British Future polling suggests that many voters still believe migration is rising, even after the sharp fall in the official figures. Public concern is being driven less by the headline statistic than by a broader sense of disorder, asylum politics, visible demographic change and distrust of government.

There is a lesson here for Labour as well as for the Conservatives. Chasing net migration targets does not defeat the politics of racialised grievance. It may legitimate it. The Cameron target did not create the far right, but it did help entrench the idea that lower net migration was the obvious test of political seriousness. Once that was accepted, every failure became evidence of betrayal.

By Professor Jonathan Portes, Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Department of Political Economy, King’s College London.