The truth about net immigration

Summary

UnHerd with Freddie Sayers – "The truth about net immigration"

Date: December 2, 2025
Guest: Dr. Madeleine Sumption, Director of the Migration Observatory, University of Oxford

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Episode Overview

Freddie Sayers of UnHerd examines the UK's latest net immigration figures, challenging misleading political narratives about a supposed “exodus” of Britons and digging into what is actually happening with immigration and emigration. Dr. Madeleine Sumption, a leading authority from the Oxford Migration Observatory, joins to clarify the statistics, assess policy impacts, and explain the real shifts since Brexit and recent government interventions.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Main Trends in Net Migration

• Net immigration has fallen steeply:

  • From close to 1 million pre-2024, falling to 649,000 (2024), and now down to 204,000 (year ending June 2025).
  • "Immigration is coming down and fast." — Freddie Sayers [06:00]

• Policy changes drive the numbers:

  • Liberalisation (the “Boris wave”) post-Brexit led to a migration boom.
  • Crackdowns—including restrictions on care worker recruitment, family members for students, and increased income thresholds—are responsible for the sharp recent drop.
  • "The data that we're seeing ... is like the first full year after all of those restrictions were bedded in." — Dr. Madeleine Sumption [09:49]

2. Breakdown of Immigration

• Numbers come down, but composition changes:
  • Earlier, most migrants were EU citizens, mainly for work.
  • Now, the majority are non-EU citizens, many from India, China, Bangladesh, various African countries, typically for work or study.
  • "[N]umbers have come down and returned to ... pre-Brexit ... the composition is very different." — Dr. Madeleine Sumption [09:59]

3. Emigration: Who Is Leaving?

• Majority of leavers are previous immigrants:

  • Most current emigration involves non-EU and EU migrants returning home.
  • An expected phenomenon due to the earlier spike in arrivals—many leave after 2 to 4 years, especially students.
  • "Partly because the majority of the people emigrating... are previous immigrants." — Dr. Madeleine Sumption [11:19]

• British nationals leaving—misleading narrative:

  • While there is notable emigration by British citizens, many “leavers” are naturalised migrants or children of migrants.
  • "[It] may be just completely untrue if ... earlier migrant waves, some of whom have got passports, [are] going home." — Freddie Sayers [32:52]
  • "We don't know... But that's one of the big data gaps actually." — Dr. Madeleine Sumption [30:15]

• Statistical and methodological uncertainties:

  • Changes in how emigration is measured (using government data vs. surveys) cause apparent jumps in the “British exodus” but are mainly artifacts.
  • "[The] new methodology ... looks like suddenly, overnight, the numbers of British people leaving the country doubled. ... It's being measured differently." — Freddie Sayers [13:07]

4. Policy & Political Implications

• Future trends uncertain, no evidence for imminent net-zero migration:

  • Labour government is introducing moderate further restrictions but a net-negative regime is unlikely.
  • "I would be very surprised to see [net zero]. ... I wouldn't confidently tell you there's going to be a reduction in the number of asylum seekers to come into the country based on the proposed policy regime." — Dr. Madeleine Sumption [21:42]
  • Any return to recent high numbers would require major policy liberalization.
  • "I would be very surprised if we went back to anything like those previous levels of migration..." — Dr. Madeleine Sumption [34:52]

• Brain drain/young professionals leaving

  • It is true some professionals and entrepreneurs seek better opportunities abroad (e.g., doctors to Australia), but mass flight of native Britons is not evidenced in the data.
  • "It's not the story of the vast majority of people appearing in these statistics." — Freddie Sayers [35:19]

• Remigration is happening—but naturally, not by coercion:

  • Many from earlier migration waves are “remigrating”, returning to countries of origin, without government intervention.
  • "[T]he controversial concept of remigration... is happening anyway, without the coercion." — Freddie Sayers [36:50]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the meaning of net migration’s fall:

  • “Immigration is coming down and fast. Is that what you would lead with?" — Freddie Sayers [06:00]
  • "That's right. So we've been on a bit of a roller coaster ride over the last few years." — Dr. Madeleine Sumption [06:21]

• On the policy impact:

  • "... expecting a few thousand people to come in as care workers. It turned out that the take up... was much higher than expected. They had over 100,000 care workers in a single year..." — Dr. Madeleine Sumption [08:04]

• On measuring British emigration:

  • "I'm not actually confident that we can even say that net emigration of British citizens is higher now than it was in the 2010s." — Dr. Madeleine Sumption [11:19]

• On the composition of British emigrants:

  • "We don't know... It would be nice to understand that in the breakdowns. We don't have that currently." — Dr. Madeleine Sumption [30:15]
  • "Some of the top destinations recently for British migrants have been Bangladesh, Romania, Poland—...not top destinations for British born British people." — Dr. Madeleine Sumption [31:53]

• On interpreting the new data methods:

  • "[T]here is certainly a risk that people will look like they're migrating ... whereas actually they're just coming in and out of the tax and benefits system itself." — Dr. Madeleine Sumption [24:01]

• On age demographics:

  • "People go abroad for gap years... they get a job looking for interesting new experiences ... So it wasn't surprising to me that ... young people ... are the ones who migrate." — Dr. Madeleine Sumption [26:13]

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Important Timestamps

• Headline immigration fall & intro: [01:27]–[06:21]
• Policy changes driving shifts: [08:04]–[09:49]
• Change in migrant composition: [09:59]–[10:37]
• Emigration patterns and caveats: [11:19]–[14:53]
• Explaining the new methodology for tracking emigration: [23:15]–[25:03]
• Discussion of young leavers/age profile: [25:03]–[27:32]
• Distinguishing native and naturalized British emigration: [28:32]–[31:53]
• Remigration and political framing: [35:19]–[36:50]

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Final Takeaways

• The narrative of a mass “British exodus” is overblown—the data mostly reflect return migration by previous immigrants, not mass departures of British-born citizens.
• Sharp falls in net migration are real and policy-driven but with crucial shifts in migrant origin and visa type.
• Statistical uncertainty remains highest for British emigration due to methodological changes and limited detail on who constitutes a “British” leaver.
• Future net migration is likely to settle lower than recent highs, but is highly sensitive to government policy and international circumstances.
• Political conversation must move beyond alarmist narratives and understand the true, nuanced story present in the migration data.

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For Further Reference

• Dr. Madeleine Sumption: Director, Migration Observatory, University of Oxford
• ONS Net Migration Data: Most recently for year ending June 2025
• Key political context: Labour’s recent, moderate migration restrictions; earlier post-Brexit liberalization; public debate dominated by perceptions rather than data realities

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This summary captures all substantive content and reflects the informative, detailed, and clarifying tone of both Freddie Sayers and Dr. Madeleine Sumption.

Transcript

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[Unherd Host]

Hello and welcome back to Unherd. What is the most significant political news story of the past week? Well, we think it's maybe something different to the story that has been all over the front pages here in the UK for days on end I. E. We don't think it is the budget nor any of the semi confected scandals around it, but in fact it's the immigration data that landed about halfway through last week from the Office of National Statistics. They say that long term international net migration, that is the numbers of people coming to the UK minus the numbers of people leaving the UK for the past year to June 2025 is down to 204,000. That is massively lower than the previous year, which in turn was massively lower than the year before. So the 2024 year was 649,000 and prior to that it was closer to a million. So we are seeing a precipitous fall in net migration to this country. The conservative minded media, in particular those around reform, for whom this is the central animating issue, sought to downplay that and to emphasize instead the large numbers of emigrating people, in other words the other side of the ledger, the numbers of people leaving the country and to try and portray that as its own crisis, that actually lots of good British people are fed up with the high tax and the lack of available housing and quite possibly the high levels of immigration and are therefore fleeing the country. There is an exodus, according to much of the conservative media of Britons, to places where their prospects are better. Maybe Australia or Abu Dhabi or the United States or even Europe. Is it actually true that. I don't think so. The main story is that immigration has massively come down. The emigration story is actually a lot more precarious once you start interrogating it. We wanted today to really dig into it and find out is this narrative true or is it actually not true at all? Our guest today is Madeleine Sumption, but before we come to her, I just want to emphasize that the politics of this could not be more important. The issue of immigration has risen to the top of all of the league tables. It is driving the national conversation here and it has completely inverted, thrown up in the air all of our political parties. Reform uk, the insurgent right wing party, is, according to the opinion polls, leading ahead of the Conservatives, ahead of Labour, who are in government, pretty much all on the back of people being fed up with high immigration numbers. So what will it do to our politics when immigration numbers come crashing down? I can't think of anything more profound, anything that is more likely to completely upend the political conversation once again. So it really, really matters what is true and what isn't true about these numbers. And so that's why we're going to give it the seriousness it deserves.

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[Unherd Host]

We are joined down the line by Dr. Madeleine Sumption, Director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. She is someone who is constantly looking across these immigration and emigration figures and actually sits on various panels and committees that feed into some of the methodologies that the ons use to try to Work out what's going on. So she is the perfect person to talk to you and welcome to Unherd.

[Dr. Madeleine Sumption]

Madeleine, thanks for having me.

[Unherd Host]

Let's just start with the headline findings that we saw last week. They've been interpreted and I would say misinterpreted in all sorts of different ways by people with different political objectives. But the bald fact is that immigration is coming down and fast. Is that what you would lead with?

[Dr. Madeleine Sumption]

That's right. So we've been on a bit of a roller coaster ride over the last few years. There was before Brexit and before the pandemic. Net migration, which is the number of people arriving minus the number of people leaving, used to fluctuate around somewhere in the region of 2 to 300,000. Now, after Brexit, with some policy liberalizations and various other things going on, those numbers tripled, reaching more than 900,000 around 20. And then the numbers collapsed, partly because of some restrictions the previous government put in to try and reduce work and study migration, but also because more people started emigrating. So the Office for National Statistics suggests that in the year ending June 2025, which is the most recent stats, we have just under 700,000 people left the country.

[Unherd Host]

So the emigration statistics are, I think, particularly interesting because people have sort of seized onto them. But I want to come to them in a moment. The immigration numbers, this is before you net off the people leaving the country. Just the numbers are just quite staggering. It's just worth setting them out. So the latest estimates from the ONS say that year ending March 2023 was 1.469 million, so very nearly 1.5 million immigrants. This goes down the subsequent year to 1.299. And now for the most recent period ending June 2025, 898,000. So it's a real. It's nearly half what it was two years previously. Is that really all explained, that huge difference in numbers of people coming just by some minor policy tweaks that the conservative government made?

[Dr. Madeleine Sumption]

Well, there are various different things going on in the data. Some of it is about restrictions. So what happened under the previous government? And it's about, I should say, when I say it's about restrictions, it's about the liberalizations that led to the high numbers and then the restrictions that reduced them again. So, for example, if you look at the care sector, the previous government initially liberalized access to the care sector, expecting a few thousand people to come in as care workers. It turned out that the take up of that was much higher than expected. They had over 100,000 care workers in a single year, plus more than 100,000 of their family members. So then they started quite a big crackdown on some of the employers of those care workers, many of whom had exploited the workers or abused the system in various ways. And so those numbers came down again. So some of the things.

[Unherd Host]

When did that happen? Sorry to interrupt, Dr. Sampson, but when did that tightening start? Because this is what's commonly referred to as the Boris wave, because he was the one who presided over the Brexit moment and then proceeded to apparently liberalize immigration rules. But when was the tightening? When did that start?

[Dr. Madeleine Sumption]

Well, the tightening for care workers in particular started around October 2023, but then it was followed by various other restrictions as well. In January 2024, there was a restriction on international students, saying that masters and undergraduate students, which is the majority of international students, couldn't bring their family members anymore. So that also had a significant impact. The restrictions on care workers also were no longer allowed to bring their family members. And there was quite a big increase in the salary requirements for, for people to come in on a long time work visa. So all of that was introduced basically by April 2024. And the data that we're seeing for the year ending June 2025 is like the first full year after all of those restrictions were bedded in.

[Unherd Host]

Before we move to emigration, is there anything else to observe about the statistics for people coming into the country, the immigration numbers that we found out about last week?

[Dr. Madeleine Sumption]

I guess the other major thing just to note is that even though the numbers have come down and returned to something maybe reasonably similar to what we saw before Brexit, the composition is very different. So in the 2000 and tens, most migrants coming to the UK were EU citizens and they were primarily coming for work, some for family members, to join family or to study. What we see now is that the large majority of people immigrating to the UK are non EU citizens, also on work and study visas, for the most part, some people claiming asylum. So we've seen quite a big shift in the composition of migration, even if the numbers have come back down to levels that are roughly similar to what we had before Brexit.

[Unherd Host]

So it's a lot more people coming from places like India, some from China, but Bangladesh, some African countries, they are the countries we read most about. Let's just talk about the other side of the ledger because that's got a huge amount of discourse over the past few days since those numbers dropped because apparently the numbers of people leaving the country seem to have gone up so much and there's a whole sort of secondary narrative. I would say that there's a kind of brain drain. People are fleeing the country because of whether it's tax burdens or home prices or levels of immigration or whatever. Is it true that emigration numbers have gone dramatically up?

[Dr. Madeleine Sumption]

It is true that there's been an increase. I think the story is a little bit more complicated than that though. Partly because the majority of the people emigrating for the country are previous immigrants. So they're people who came from EU or non EU countries in the past and have decided to return home now. That's actually reasonably normal. And we would expect an increase in emigration because we had such high levels of immigration a few years ago. And because a lot of people quite naturally, either through choice or because they can't get another visa, leave the country after two, three, four years, we would expect to see an increase in non EU citizens leaving. And that is what we've seen. We also have perhaps a little bit more surprisingly, there are still appear to be quite a lot of EU citizens who arrived before Brexit under free movement. And now substantial numbers of people are still leaving the country. And that's actually taken quite a lot of the overall net migration figures. So when that comes to an end, we should see the overall figures ticking up. There is also some quite significant emigration of British citizens. Some again might be previous migrants. So this will include people who, who migrated here, became UK citizens and then are leaving sometimes with their British born children. We don't know precisely what share of the British emigrants were actually born in the UK versus naturalized after they came here. But those trends are particularly uncertain because we've got this new methodology from the Office for National Statistics which is trying to improve the way that it measures emigration and immigration of Brits. And they're really not comparable with the lower figures that we had, say in the 2010s which were produced using completely different methodology. So I'm not actually confident that we can even say that net emigration of British citizens is higher now than it was in the 2000 and tens. I think we'll just, you know, we don't yet know and hopefully as the methods improve and we get more data, we'll get a better picture of that.

[Unherd Host]

Yeah, there's actually a chart that was rather overlooked in the excitement after last week's report that shows the kind of lines before and after the methodology change. And it is a step change. It looks like suddenly, overnight, the numbers of British people leaving the country doubled. Whilst obviously that didn't actually happen in the real world, it's just it's being measured differently. But the line since the new methodology change is about flat, it looks to me. So it's not even true that numbers of British people leaving within the period of the new methodology is going up. It seems to be about constant.

[Dr. Madeleine Sumption]

Yeah, that's absolutely right. If you're looking at the gross number of people leaving, then that's basically flat. There has intriguingly been a decrease, particularly around 2022, 2023 of people who had already left who are coming back now. I'm not confident, but these are very new methodologies. There are going to be revisions. We'll see where the numbers settle down. I wouldn't yet want to read into precisely why might that be happening, because it could be just a statistical quirk that will get revised away. There is a slight net increase in these figures over the last few years, increase in net British emigration, but it's not driven by more people leaving, it's driven apparently by fewer people who had already left returning.

[Unherd Host]

To confirm then, the big change that we can be confident about in the past few years in terms of emigration people leaving, is not that larger numbers of British people are leaving than before, not the larger numbers of European Union citizens are leaving because that line also looks relatively flat. So the big change, the headline, is that people from outside Europe are going home.

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[Dr. Madeleine Sumption]

Yes, yeah, that's absolutely right. And that's largely people who came on study visas, which is broadly speaking what we expect because there was a significant previous increase in the number of international students coming here in the first place. Interestingly, although we see emigration going up, it's not actually going up as much as I would have expected to given the significant numbers of people who came to the UK over the last few years. So what we've also seen is that international students in particular have become more likely to stay in the UK and more likely to switch to long term visas that might give them a path to permanent status. But even despite that, we see an increase of in emigration because there are still a lot of people who come to the end of their studies, or maybe work for a little bit after their studies and then leave home as.

[Unherd Host]

The system intended them to do, is what we're seeing. That the so called Boris wave, that huge surge in migrants, is leading to these larger departure numbers because a proportion of them don't want to stick around.

[Dr. Madeleine Sumption]

Yep, that's absolutely right. And many people. So if you look at Chinese students, for example, they have always been quite unlikely to stay in the UK after their studies, and that continues to be the case. There are some people from other countries who are more keen on staying and moving on to work visas, possibly permanent work visas, like people who come from India or Nigeria. But broadly speaking, the data for the most recent couple of years are a little bit uncertain. But we could well be in a situation where most of the people who came as international students left in the past. It used to be the vast majority. It used to be more like 80, 85% who left. It varies a lot by visa category. So if you look at people who come here as a family member of a British citizen, for example, the large majority of those people stay probably around 90%, which you would expect because they came here in order to live with someone who is a citizen of this country. Similarly, refugees appear to stay, based on the data that we've got, which is not brilliant, but it looks like people who claim asylum tend to stay in the country as well. Many of those would be people who've been granted refugee status and don't want to go back to their country of origin. You also actually see that a majority of people who are refused refugee status in the asylum system also tend to stay in the UK and not be removed.

[Unherd Host]

Do you think these effects are likely to continue then, these trends? Because if there's a sort of two or three year hangover from big surges of immigration, we're not having such a surge right now. So what would you normally expect to see two or three years hence?

[Dr. Madeleine Sumption]

Right, well, that's a very good question. And I wouldn't expect these trends to continue. What we should in theory see is that emigration of non EU citizens will start to come down a bit after you've had the people who arrived in 2022 and 2023. After a certain number of years, the people who were going to leave have already left. And so you would sort of settle down potentially with a slightly lower level of emigration among EU citizens. I'm actually surprised that emigration is still so high because generally people who are going to leave tend to leave within about five to eight years, or that's what past data has suggested we're nearing the end of that period for EU citizens. And so what I would expect to see over the next few years is that net immigration of EU citizens, which is currently around 70,000. Right. So they're taking 70,000 off the total net migration statistics because of EU citizens. Those are largely people who arrived before Brexit. That shouldn't continue forever. So I think when you add those two things together and look at the overall level of net migration which is coming in at just over 200,000 currently, I would expect some upward pressure on that number as a result of emigration.

[Unherd Host]

Dropping a little bit, but that's presuming that people keep coming in at the same rate. I mean, we do have, you know, there's all sorts of policies that the labor government are talking about to reduce that number. So if some of them come into effect, you know, there's a study out today actually claiming that we could be in net zero or net negative migration as soon as the end of next year. I mean, do you think that's for the birds?

[Dr. Madeleine Sumption]

I would be very surprised to see that happen. The short run is quite uncertain. Labour have introduced some further restrictions beyond what the previous government had already done. So for example, they closed the care sector to overseas recruitment of migrant workers and there were some restrictions on middle skilled jobs that are no longer eligible for, for the immigration system at all, or at least for long term work visas. But those, I think compared to some of the previous restrictions, those are more modest changes. They of course also they would very much like to see a reduction in the number of people claiming asylum in the UK and have put in place various measures to try to deter people. It's very uncertain whether those measures will have a meaningful impact at all actually on the number of asylum seekers coming to the uk. We'll have to see. There's mixed evidence from different countries, but I certainly wouldn't confidently tell you that there's going to be a reduction in, in the number of asylum seekers to come into the country based on the proposed policy regime.

[Unherd Host]

So it sounds like you think the evidence points to this figure coming up somewhat in the following years. From what we can best estimate at the moment.

[Dr. Madeleine Sumption]

Yeah, it's incredibly uncertain. And next year is, I think, probably the most uncertain because we'll still be seeing some emigration and that could continue for at least a couple of years. We may see lower immigration because of Labour's policy measures. But, but looking out maybe five years from now, if I had to guess, I would say the numbers are more likely to be higher than lower. But projecting migration is a very hazardous exercise.

[Unherd Host]

Could we just dig in, please, to the British emigration number? Because I know you were a part of the committee that signed off the new sort of methodology for estimating that. And as I understand it, estimates for the number of British nationals leaving the country used to be done via this survey, and that then became a less accurate way of measuring it. So there's a new method which involves pretty much looking at touch points that people have with the government national insurance tax, and if they suddenly go silent and suddenly they cease to kind of appear in government databases, they become a potential emigrant. And if that continues for more than a year, we count them as having left. Is that a reasonable layman's summary of the new method?

[Dr. Madeleine Sumption]

Yes, it is. There are a couple of areas where it's a bit more complicated. So there are specific groups of people that ONS has identified are particularly likely to go silent, and then they adjust the figures to wait a little bit longer before deciding that those people have emigrated. I think the challenge with these statistics, and the reason I think that this is the piece of the overall migration statistics picture that is most uncertain, is that onslaught isn't directly able to measure British people coming in and out in the way that they can with people for people with visas. And so they are relying on these other signs of activity, which for the moment is just the tax and benefit system. And so there is certainly a risk that people will look like they're migrating in and out of the country, whereas actually they're just coming in and out of the tax and benefits system itself. Hopefully they will be able to do more work to try and create reassurance that this is really measuring the immigration and emigration trends accurately. But I wouldn't be surprised at all if we do see some revisions to this in the future as they perfect the methods.

[Unherd Host]

There's one table that was included in the ONS release that has caused a lot of interest which plots the exodus or the people leaving the country. Britons leaving the country by age group, and it looks almost neutral for under 16s. And then suddenly the biggest bar we can put it on the screen for those people watching on YouTube, is the 16 to 24 age group, then the 25 to 34, and then it becomes net positive again for the older age bands and their immigration for those groups. This, I just thought was a bit suspect somehow, the idea that suddenly lots of people on their 16th birthday were, you know, taking their passports and moving to Abu Dhabi and Australia and places of greater economic opportunity. I mean, I think obviously that is happening for certain professional groups. You think of doctors in particular going to Australia and I'm sure there are entrepreneurs with businesses who think they can move from abroad. But do you share my skepticism about the idea that there are lots of sort of ordinary British people in their late teens deciding to flee the country to better prospects elsewhere?

[Dr. Madeleine Sumption]

Yeah, I mean, so we don't have a breakdown within that age group currently. So basically there's the 16 to 24 age group and then the 25 to 35 and we don't have a very good breakdown within that. I think in general, yes, I agree with you about 16 year olds. If we got that breakdown, I would hope, if the statistics are plausible, that we're not seeing a mass exodus of 16 year olds because I think that's not very likely. We do know that young people in general in the more like sort of 20 to 35 age range, those are the people who are most likely to migrate. It's much easier to migrate at that time. People go abroad for gap years, then maybe they spend a bit longer, they get a job looking for interesting new experiences. They don't have kids yet. And so because once people have kids and settle down, actually migrating becomes a bit more of a hassle. That's much more difficult. So it wasn't surprising to me that if Brits are going to be leaving, it would be young people who would be doing it, because those around the world in general, those tend to be the people who migrate.

[Unherd Host]

Yes. Okay, so you're broadly confident, you don't think there's any chance that these are just people who are invisible to the system and somehow got lost. A bit like the 150,000 odd schoolchildren that disappeared from the system during COVID I mean, there's no chance that these are just people who have gone missing from our records.

[Dr. Madeleine Sumption]

Imagine there was a crystal ball and we were able to see precisely what was going on. I would very much expect it to be young people who are doing the migrating, both leaving the UK and then coming back again after a few years. I also think it's possible that some of the trends that we're seeing at the scale of, of emigration is also being driven by people just going quiet in the system and not having been picked up. Yeah, I think that's a real challenge. And so I think the challenge for the ONS to try and address this is going to be maybe looking at other data sources that they can see that aren't tax and benefits, but other places people might pop up in the system, NHS records, for example, are one of them. But that's not easy to do. And there are all sorts of, obviously the Office of National Statistics, you'll probably be reassured to hear, can't just sort of grab whichever data they want from across government and link it all up. It is, it's quite a difficult process to do all of this. So I hope that we will be able eventually to move to a more direct measure of immigration and emigration, because I do worry that these statistics, I don't think they're the end of the story on the topic.

[Unherd Host]

The other question mark around these emigration numbers is what we're defining as a Brit, a British national. It feels like a crucial piece of information. How many of these British nationals leaving are actually immigrants who have acquired a national insurance number or a passport even over the preceding 5, 10, 15 years and have subsequently decided to go home? And how many of them are, you know, British born British people?

[Sherrell Dorsey]

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[Dr. Madeleine Sumption]

Yeah, well, we don't know. So the Office for National Statistics is it looks at those data on national insurance numbers and it makes an adjustment to the British citizen emigration figures in order to try and make them more accurate. We then have your separate question about. Okay, well, there are people, obviously many British citizens were born elsewhere and then became a citizen after they arrived. It would be nice to understand that in the breakdowns we don't have that currently. If you go way back to a previous data source that had its own problems, that wasn't brilliant that we had until 2019. It looks like if you looked at British citizens leaving at that time, just under 20% of them were not born in the UK and so were probably naturalised British citizens. That share could potentially probably has changed to some extent. I would perhaps expect it to have gone up because we've had more immigration during this period. But yeah, that's one of the big data gaps actually. We don't have a great picture.

[Unherd Host]

But also you were mentioning that countries like Eastern European countries, Poland and so on have been registering large numbers of British citizens coming back or arriving there. And it seems reasonable to presume that a lot of those are European Union migrants, as it were, the kind of first wave under Tony Blair. The European Union migrants who have subsequently got British paperwork and have then decided to go home and they're counted in this as British nationals. And so you get lots of pearl clutching that lots of British people are fleeing the country, whilst actually it's Polish people who've come here, become British citizens and for whatever reason they've decided to go home.

[Dr. Madeleine Sumption]

Yep. No, absolutely. So they are British nationals, legally speaking. And we see from separate data that aren't totally comparable to this that some of the top destinations recently for British migrants have been Bangladesh, Romania, Poland, you know, not top destinations for British born British people. And I think it would be helpful to understand those separately because people will understand it's quite natural for someone, even after they've, if they migrate here, become a British citizen, maybe they'd, they change their mind, they want to go home, they go back with their British born children who would also be citizens. That is quite a different phenomenon to saying someone who's lived here their entire lives and then at age of 25 decides they want to leave. My suspicion is that there are quite a few naturalised citizens in those citizenship figures. I think, you know, ons they need to do the figures by citizenship and that, you know, so they wouldn't want to pretend that those people weren't citizens. But I think it is always useful additionally then to understand, okay, of the citizens, which ones were born in the UK and lived here all their lives and who were the people who migrated here.

[Unherd Host]

And that feels like an incredibly important thing to know because there's currently a big sort of narrative abroad that British people are fleeing the country which may be just completely untrue if it's in fact portions of earlier migrant waves, some of whom have got passports going home, that's a completely different story and it's just not available in these statistics. Could we look the other end, looking at the countries that are receiving the most British citizens and could we use that to sort of determine what kinds of British citizens are leaving? It feels pretty unlikely as you say, that lots of British born people are moving to Bangladesh for economic opportunity. It's much more likely that those people have connections to Bangladesh ness in some sense taking their families home. Is there an exercise that we can do that way around?

[Dr. Madeleine Sumption]

There is. The UN collects data and they show if you look at the change in the number of people that they classify as British then which is either British born or British citizens, slight lack of transparency about which is used when. But we see overall Bangladesh, Poland, Romania, top countries. There has been less change in the number of people in some of the top countries where British born people would tend to go, the English speaking countries like Australia, us, Canada, for example, big.

[Unherd Host]

Picture, your view is that the huge levels of immigration that we saw 20, 2123 are behind us. Looks like we're not about to go back to those anytime soon. And the big question is whether numbers go gently down or gently up. This kind of central political talking point of immigration, net migration numbers in the many, many hundreds of thousands, which has had such profound impacts on our politics, feels like it's sort of moving behind us, we're moving past it.

[Dr. Madeleine Sumption]

I certainly wouldn't want to predict that, oh well, everything's going to be calm and level from now on because there is always something unexpected that shows up. But I would be very surprised if we went back to anything like those previous levels of migration unless there was a complete change of in government and a decision to have significant liberalization of policy in the way that we had with the post Brexit immigration system.

[Unherd Host]

Madeleine Sumption, thank you so much for your time today.

[Dr. Madeleine Sumption]

Thanks for having me.

[Unherd Host]

Our thanks there to Dr. Madeleine Sumption from the Oxford Migration Observatory. Through all that technical discussion, I think there are some really important things to take away from it. The first is that the headline finding that net immigration has come crashing down is robust and true and matters a great deal. The second is that this secondary story that you've probably been reading a lot about in the last few days, the supposed exodus of Brits from this country, although is concerning and true among professional people, I'm sure we've discussed doctors for example, many of whom are going to Australia. And certainly if you're an entrepreneur or you are a business owner with some hope of selling it, you may well be trying to relocate to more favorable tax regimes. That is not the story of the vast majority of people appearing in these statistics. In fact, the larger numbers of emigrants people leaving the country are in no small measure immigrants who have received paperwork and passports and are leaving and going back to their original country with their families. So even the British component is partially, maybe even a great deal of it is explained by this maiden story, which is the earlier waves of immigrants, the big Tony Blair era European Union expansion wave, are still going home and the so called Boris wave, many of whom were from outside the European Union, are also starting to go home. It's just not what you hear about in the political conversation. The sense is that we are being constantly only the recipients of more and more people, but actually people leave. We saw this in Sweden as well and it's now happening. The much discussed and highly controversial concept of remigration that certain political parties on the right would like to bring into common parlance, where basically you are paying or encouraging or even forcing people to go back to their countries of origin is happening anyway, without the coercion, many, many hundreds of thousands of people are going home. I don't feel you read about this enough and I'm really glad that doctor said consumption was there to shed some light on it. Thanks for tuning in. This was unheard.

[Sherrell Dorsey]

Hi, this is Sherrell Dorsey from TedTech, and this episode is brought to you by Solidigm. The World Runs on data, and data relies on storage, but most businesses rarely think about how crucial that storage really is. The truth is, it's no longer just a commodity with new demands and constraints, especially from AI. The old ways of managing data are holding innovation back. Solid state storage from solidigm is changing that. It helps reduce energy use, shrink physical footprints, and accelerate data at the edge, unlocking more from your AI infrastructure. Learn more at whatsthestateofyourstorage.com Skipping cold and.

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