We do not have to choose between mass migration and growth

Politics is about winning arguments and winning elections. For better or worse, everything else is secondary to this. Democratic politics is a ruthless, winner-takes-all fight, especially in Britain with a first-past-the-post voting system and a constitution founded on parliamentary supremacy. And therefore, building a winning coalition of voters is the most essential task facing our politicians.

While politicians want to be radical — and Britain does indeed need radical thinking and radical solutions to its problems — many of Britain’s voters are not radical. Some are, to be sure. Most voters, however, to the extent that they engage with politics, are worried about their mortgages, the cost of their commute and their weekly shop, and whether the health service functions when they need it. 

This puts reformist politicians in a bind. The implosion of the Truss government was a reminder of how quickly a radical policy agenda can blow up on impact if its advocates have not cultivated a strong coalition of voters around it, armed with compelling and persuasive arguments. The failure of Starmer on a “no dramas” platform, by contrast, is a fascinating example of how a government can steadily alienate its coalition of voters with broken promises, lies, and poor policy. 

Nowhere is the need for good arguments and coalition-building more pertinent than with immigration, perhaps the most important policy issue of our time. The British public, overall,believe immigration is too high and they have been hostile to mass immigration for some time. That is not disputed. What is disputed, however, are the potential economic consequences of stopping and indeed reversing mass immigration in modern Britain, and whether the benefits outweigh any costs. It is likely that, in the unradical middle of the British electorate, there are large numbers of voters who accept the downsides of mass immigration, but fear it is a necessity to keep the economy ticking over. 

This is where the reality of coalition-based politics comes into play, and how those who want to restore sense to Britain’s border policy must respond adequately. 

Suggesting that cutting immigration would harm the economy is to concede a significant argument unnecessarily

In June, a Restore Britain activist said on LBC that he would support halting all immigration and deporting large numbers of migrants even if it led to poverty in Britain. Admirable ideological moral clarity. But it represents a fundamental mistake both in terms of actual policy and how to build a coalition of voters around one’s ideas whilst on the airwaves. 

Regarding the policy implications itself, suggesting that cutting immigration would harm the economy is to concede a significant argument unnecessarily. Ironically, it means that the anti-establishment Restore is singing a tune written and played by the Office for Budget Responsibility. Both embrace a false binary. There is not a straight choice between prosperity and immigration on the one hand, and poverty and no immigration on the other. Over the last 25 years, Britain has tested this theory to destruction. 

Living standards and productivity growth have stagnated, and Britain’s GDP per capita has been stagnant since the financial crisis. Since Tony Blair’s election in 1997, governments of both major parties have talked a tough game on immigration but did very little to reduce it, despite wishes of voters. Indeed, successive governments, both Labour and Tory, continued to encourage immigration believing it was good for the economy. 

Since the recent explosion of immigration from 2021 onwards, this idea has been shown to be laughably false. Despite Boris Johnson’s protestations that the millions of migrants who came to Britain following his immigration policy changes were vital for the economy and ensuring supermarkets could afford to employ people to stack shelves, the British economy has stagnated and British living standards have declined. 

The Government took an explicitly pro-migration position, despite rhetoric to the contrary, by reducing salary threshold for visas, lowering the skill threshold for skilled visas from degree-equivalent to A-Level equivalent and expanding the opportunities for companies to sponsor visas to the point that corner shops and takeaways have been allowed to bring migrant workers to Britain. These schemes were so poorly designed that not only were more dependents than workers brought to the UK on the Health and Care Visa, but many of these workers came to work in care homes which didn’t even exist. 

Consequently, the average wages of migrants coming to the UK have collapsed. Before 2020, migrants from Nigeria and India, for example, typically earned more than the median monthly earnings of British people between 22 and 40 years old. Since 2021, these earnings have fallen to below average British salaries, likely reflecting the Government’s pivot to a lower-skilled model of immigration policy, in stark contrast to its insistence of pursuing a high-wage and high-skilled approach to immigration. 

It’s not just the labour market that has suffered. This flow of flexible and cheap labour into the UK has also served successive governments as a distraction from other stickier and more complicated issues which hugely impact our economic prosperity, such as welfare dependency, infrastructure, planning reform or energy policy.

Unsurprisingly, in this context, attitudes to immigration have hardened. Immigration is consistently rated by the British public as one of the country’s top three concerns alongside the state of the economy and the health service. For example, recent polling conducted by Prosperity Institute found that the public think that immigration is a burden on the NHS, and that the standard of care provided by foreign doctors and nurses is lower quality than the care provided by British staff. 

The country’s public services are straining from huge additional demand. Welfare spending has ballooned to unsustainable levels and much of that has been accelerated by demands from migrants, from both the EU and from further afield. As housebuilding and infrastructure construction have ground to a halt, the country’s capital stock is being squeezed by a migration-driven population boom. Thanks to the absurdity of Britain’s human rights laws, new houses are offered to asylum seekers while young British workers squeeze into smaller, and more expensive flats than before. 

And so, to accept the establishment premise that the choice facing the British people is either immigration or poverty is to fall at the first hurdle in the debate. 

If this is so self-evident, however, why must immigration restrictionists argue with such care? Surely, one might say, the public will see through the pro-immigration arguments with ease. More people are, certainly. But the unavoidable reality of building coalitions means winning over a broad base of voters.

Political parties vowing to cut immigration have an uphill struggle when it comes to shifting the established narrative. The OBR states that continuous net migration of around 250,000 people per year is important for maintaining trendline economic growth. Recently, it produced new forecasts which paint an even gloomier picture. It states that thanks to lower migration and birth rates, the old-age dependency ratio is getting worse, which puts pressure on the public finances by increasing welfare spending and depressing tax receipts as the working age population shrinks.

The Treasury has long worried about the old age dependency ratio following declining fertility rates and believes that immigration offers a solution to this problem as well as benefiting the public finances from visa fees and tax receipts paid by migrants. Just as Restore Britain’s spokesman said on LBC recently, the OBR and the Treasury essentially state that Britain has a choice between mass immigration or poverty.

While mass immigration has not generated anywhere near the kind of prosperity its advocates have claimed, it is undeniable that the public finances are in a perilous condition, and this is not something any party taking a radical position should ignore. A critical mass of voters who are worried about paying their mortgages must be persuaded to support radical change — as they were in 1979 and 2016 — and it is incumbent on radical politicians to win them round with clear arguments and a cool head.

Britain does not face a false choice between migration and growth or secure borders

Though the OBR is one of the most established institutional proponents of the economic benefits of mass immigration, its arguments fly in the face of reality. For example, the OBR assumes that migrants arrive in the UK at 25 years old and without dependents. The OBR’s estimates do not consider migrants’ consumption of healthcare, nor that of their families. While the OBR argues that its stylised 25-year-old migrant on an average salary may be a long-term fiscal benefit to the country, this doesn’t represent the reality of immigration to Britain. For example, reported salaries of people on the Health and Care Visa and even the Graduate Visa fell way below the national average, and below the salaries of those on Skilled Worker Visas. Between 2021 and 2025 — when overdue restrictions to visas were introduced — over 400,000 people arrived on the Graduate Visa and 270,000 people arrived on the Health and Care Visa, far outnumbering the 200,000 or so people who arrived on the more fiscally beneficial Skilled Worker Visa. When one adds the extraordinary figure of 340,000 dependents of those of Health and Care Visas — whom the Migration Observatory cite as a significant fiscal burden — the picture becomes clear: Britain has not pursued a pro-growth immigration policy; it has done the exact opposite. This, of course, only addresses the costs of legal migration. As illegal immigration reaches a crisis point — both in terms of numbers, accommodation, integration and crime — the costs associated with the asylum system will climb far into the billions of pounds.

Britain does not face a false choice between migration and growth or secure borders. British voters should not be asked to make such a choice, either by the establishment Blob or by radical conservatives. Instead, they should be offered a better, truer vision of Britain’s possible future: highly restrictive and low immigration, bolstered domestically by labour market; welfare and planning reform to encourage job creation; labour mobility and family formation within the UK; a competitive energy policy and corporate tax regime which encourages construction; automation and innovation; and healthcare reforms to train British doctors and nurses, preventing the dysfunctional health service from plugging short term labour gaps with a permanent migration solution. Britain can have both low migration and economic prosperity.

Just as in 1979 and 2016, a decisive amount of the non-radical middle stands ready to be convinced of a new model that makes sense of what they can see with their own eyes: that as mass migration has shot up, their household prosperity has gone down. If they have what it takes, it falls to those aspiring to power to make the case and to win. If politicians do not offer them something convincing, then we should not expect voters to deliver them to power.