Britain’s secret border-control success

And why it dare not speak its name

Immigration and border control is a topic so polarising, discussed with such hysteria and acrimony that it’s hard to work what’s really going on. The idea that things may be now starting to come back under control solicits a furious response from both sides of the the political divide. Tribes of the right are wedded to a story of calamity and won’t tolerate any deviation from this narrative. Tribes of the left dislike the whole border-control agenda. Each sides draws its caricature and the real, nuanced picture is lost. Milestones, even major ones like the registration of foreign workers to the UK hitting a 20-year-old, go unnoticed. Migration control is becoming the success that dare not speak its name. There’s plenty problems still, but strikingly fewer than there were three years ago. Progress is, I think, worth noting. Let’s start.

First, small boats. This is normally shown as an accumulating annual total starting from Jan 1 of each year; a problem getting worse. But count it as a rolling 12-month cumulative figure (arrivals from 24 Aug 2025 to 23 Aug 2026) and it down 40pc from their peak and heading towards a four-year low.

The advantage of a graph shown in this way (rather than messy-line ‘from Jan’ graphs) is that we can see the two humps. The second coming after Labour’s arrival in gvt, then a return to pre-election levels. Why? Stronger French-side disruption, more disruption of gangs’ equipment etc and the deterrent effect of faster migration claim handling. Every little helps. A massive superboat grabbed the headlines recently, giving the impression of the problem being bigger than ever. But last month, July, saw fewer crossings than any July since 2020. Such crossings would fall to zero if Andy Burnham enacted legal reform that would allow him same-day deportation of everyone who entered illegally. He could then take in legitimate refugees (who apply through camps) on his terms, restoring public faith in the process.

Now, on to those who made it over…

The backlog now stands at a quarter of its Tory-era peak. The bulge was from a Tory decision not to process those who arrived after Sunak’s ill-fated Rwanda bill, in the hope that those late arrivals could be booted out en masse and processed in Kigale. Some 800 more decision-makers were hired under the Tories in 2023 to speed things up. When the backlog started to be processed under Labour with the bigger team, the number fell. Asylym approvals, once 72pc, are back around the historical average of 40pc. Click on ‘decision outcomes’ and we see the actual number of approvals falling sharply. Rejected claimants can appeal, which clogs up the loophole-addled system afresh (click on ‘appeals’ to see).

If the process was working properly, we’d see a recent spike in deportations. Instead they’re rising slowly and are half of what they were twenty years ago.

The above is a dial that Andy Burnham can move any time by giving more money to Bas Javid’s deportation squad. They literally have the addresses of the next 2,000 people they’d deport. Top of that list are almost 20,000 foreign prisoners, released from jail with no right to be in the UK, waiting for the call. There’s even a special form of welfare for those on the deportee waiting list. Compare this debacle to America where any illegal migrant is offered a free flight and $3,000 to get out of dodge which they can arrange on an App. And if they don’t accept this offer, then the ICE men cometh. America is probably at net-zero migration now. There’s a happy medium to be found between our sclerosis and America’s street battles. Javid’s team needs proper funding.

Meanwhile Shabana Mahmood is clamping down on visas. The post-panic Tories started a cycle of condition-tightening, stopping students and care workers taking dependants; Yvette Cooper and Mahmood raised work-visa salary requirements, restricted Skilled Worker visas to graduate-level jobs and added language requirements. The results were updated this week. And remember, before Brexit, EU nationals did not need a visa so the idea of a sudden surge is inflated.

So how to adjust for the fact that EU nationals would not have needed a visa? What would a consistent series look like? The closest is National Insurance numbers: every EU national worker has always needed one of those. Click on ‘annual’ to see that this constant measure of foreign nationals being given approval to work in the UK is now at the lowest in 20 years. I’m not aware of any minister ever mentioning this.

Now the big one: net migration. Strip out students and asylum (the bulge came from Ukraine and Hong Kong) and we see basic net migration falling to the ‘tens of thousands’ at the end of last year. The dismal data lag (Home Office reporting and modelling is awful) means we’ll have no 2026 data for ages. At the start of this year I thought the UK would follow Sweden in hitting net zero this year; I now think that unlikely but numbers will be at a multiyear low.

The small grey bar at the bottom shows a steady net outflow of UK passport holders. A lot of them will be naturalised migrants joining the 1,000-a-day remigration exodus (of which more below). The gates are closing.

The coming ILR wave

I suspect the story will soon turn to those already here. The so-called Boriswave means that those let in will be able to apply for ‘indefinite leave to remain’ - and, with that, welfare - after five years. Home Office modelling suggests more than 400,000 ILR in 2028. Right now they have ‘no recourse to public funds’ (NRPF) as migrants (so no Universal Credit subsidy for low-waged work). Shabana Mahmood wants to either extend this NRPF or move the five-year ILR goalpost to avert the below outcome. Click on ‘who settled’ and we can already see ILR creep up.

Of course, pre-Brexit no EU national needed ILR. They arrived here with full rights on day one. Now they need a visa. So the ‘surge’ will be a recording artefact. EU workers did need an National Insurance number - so the comparable figure is the one at a 20-year low. But no minister talks about this. What they talk about and fret about is ILR.

My Times colleague Matt Dathan reports the almost 200,000 were given ILR last year, a 24pc increase. Mahmood’s plans to slow this with ILR reform are expected in November, but Labour backbenchers are pushing back against extending the five-year period. She may extend the ‘no recourse to public funds’ which I regard as a no-brainer: combining a non-contributory welfare scheme with mass immigration is a bad combo. We’ll know in the autumn.

A lot of migrants are not hanging around to find out what she decides. This takes us to another major new trend that I’ve never seen reported: remigration. The ONS has had to restate these numbers but each year 412,000 foreign nationals permanently leave the UK. The ONS struggled to measure this so the new series is lower than the old one but still a multiple of what it once was.

This is how migration works: most of those who arrive stay for a while, earn or study, then go back home. Brits once did to America. Studies show 65pc of the 2019 cohort were offski after five years. The Boriswave was always going to lead to a massive out-migratory wave a few years on.

The biggest problem with mass migration, in my view, is that it covered up dysfunction in the UK labour market and welfare state and allowed ministers to proceed without reform. The economy has created almost two million more jobs so far this decade, but we have fewer UK-born workers. The basic link between economic growth and poverty-reduction has been broken: employers naturally wanted the industrious work-ready migrants and not the risk of hiring a Neet. The result is below. It is no way to run an economy:-

Britain has, overall, been lucky in the quality of its industrious immigrants but with 6.7m on out-of-work benefits they have perhaps been too much of a good thing. It has been madness to shovel hundreds of thousands of Brits on to sickness benefit every day while importing hundreds of thousands of migrant workers. It gives employers the easy option, and stops them trying hard to offer better pay and prospects. It stops care homes paying skilled wage for a skilled job.

The liberal case for border control is to force employers to look to the local unemployed to fill jobs. To force ministers to repair the broken work incentives. Repair the welfare state, reconnect the economy to the people currently excluded from it. It’s not a right wing or left wing: it’s about using border control to promote economic and social cohesion.

To be clear, I think the situation now is grave. The small-boats has allowed the UK asylum system to be taken over by criminal gangs and their clients. This has led to justified public outrage. The gangs’ modus operandi depends on a legal document: the 1951 Refugee Convention, now utterly unsuited to demands of the second quarter of the 21st century. Britain can tear it up tomorrow and lead the world in a new settlement, discharging our moral obligation to the world's poorest on our terms rather than those of gangmasters. We choose not to. Small boats happen because ministers choose not to remove their legal modus operandi. Ministers choose to allow control to rest with a 1951 document never intended for the parameters it now governs.

But ministers do, now, have control over legal border crossings - and that control is, finally, being exercised. With visible results. Keir Starmer was slow to realise this but in Shabana Mahmood he alighted on the right Home Secretary with the right strategy. One of the drawbacks of changing Prime Minister every two years is that they never get the chance to learn. Let’s see if Andy Burnham can do any better.